Year Zero (14 page)

“You’ve seen this yourself?” asked Nathan Lee.

“Only pictures in magazines. Now there are no more magazines.”

Nathan Lee couldn’t help himself. “People are dying of invisibility?”

“Not at all. That is a symptom, nothing more. As the pigment dissolves, your mind begins to die. Soon you forget everything. Everything. Soldiers at war, they drop their weapons. That is good. But also, farmers leave their fields. Mothers forget their babies. The social contract falls to pieces. The entire population slowly starves. One by one, the nations are dying. There is no cure. No hope.”

“This is in Europe, you say?”

“There is no Europe anymore.”

“There must be survivors,” said Nathan Lee.

“None.”

Nathan Lee didn’t believe a word of it. They had to be exaggerating about some pocket of disease. No disease could have a hundred percent attrition, or it would end up wiping itself out. It occurred to him that they were part of some doomsday cult. Their
guru
or
rinpoche
had hooked a pair with these two.

“You don’t believe me?” the Frenchman seethed. “My whole family. My country. Gone.”

“It just seems so fantastic,” he said. “How can a disease that kills everyone….”

Monique interrupted him. “The disease is not the killer. They forget themselves. It is a state of peace, not death. The people are dying because they no longer remember to eat or they wander into the cold with no clothing. They fall from bridges and drown. They walk into the sea.”

This was getting more farfetched by the word. “Where are the doctors? Where are the relief agencies?”

“They tried,” Monique somberly declared. “It is what they call a doctors’ disease. The doctors rushed in, only to be killed very quickly. Rescue groups learned not to send workers because they became infected, too. Then the airdrops of food were suspended, too, because it was decided food only prolonged the suffering. My mother….” She stopped.

My daughter.
Her face flashed in Nathan Lee’s mind. For a moment he imagined her as part of this wild French fantasy. Immediately he rejected the notion. It was very simple. In his heart he could never accept such a thing. His daughter had sustained him through his hell. He would sustain her.

A tear trickled down Monique’s face. The man reached to hold her hand. “Our loved ones are freed of suffering,” he said. “They are cleansed. They have entered the stream.”

Nathan Lee listened to the man’s twaddle, and a switch flipped inside him. He felt anger. They were feeding him, but he didn’t owe them his gullibility. They were deluded. Their story was self-fulfilling. They had gone on a pilgrimage to destroy the self and be reborn, and so their whole world was doing it with them.

“And so the plague is coming?” Nathan Lee said.

“From the south. No one knows when it will arrive. Weeks. Months.”

“But why are people walking around like nothing’s happening? Hasn’t anyone told them?”

“They know. It was all foretold. But where would they go?”

Outside, a temple bell chimed. A cart rumbled by. Nathan Lee finished wolfing down his rice. He felt clarified by the food and caffeine. A plan was coming together in his mind.

“What about you?” he asked them.

Monique regained her composure. “The Lord Buddha teaches us to have a clear mind. Our place is here,” she said. “The present era is over. A higher species will evolve. Gods and godesses will repopulate the mountaintops. The wheel of life is turning.”

Nathan Lee thanked them for the meal. He wished them well.

“Namaste,”
Monique said to him. I bow to the divine in you.

Outside the restaurant, Nathan Lee straddled the Frenchman’s mountain bike and rode off. A moan of joy escaped his lips. He was free. He was going to see his daughter.

L
OS
A
LAMOS
N
OVEMBER
, O
NE
W
EEK
L
ATER

S
he found Miranda alone among the bones, singing. The world was going to pieces. The borders were sealed. The plague was coming. And here she sang. Golding paused in the doorway. It was some soft sort of ballad, maybe very old, maybe the latest tune, and Miranda could have been serenading the clutter of skulls and femurs and ribs.

Golding felt her heart reach out. The girl looked so solitary among the dead, but she sounded so happy. She didn’t belong here. And yet so much depended on her being right where she was. Miranda was finally letting her hair grow out. Pale red strands traced across the mahogany bones.

“Knock, knock,” she said.

Miranda’s head lifted. “Elise?” A smile lit her face, no pretence, no ulterior motive. Golding had not felt so welcome in a long time. They hugged, and Miranda held onto her the extra, golden second.

“Am I interfering?”

“I was just getting some of the guys pieced together. Come in. You can help, if you want.”

Golding walked among the tables, and every bone carried a small bar-code decal. Some lay in little heaps on plastic or aluminum trays. Some had been partially articulated: ribs to vertebrae, mandibles to craniums. Here was most of a hand, here only a fingernail. Several nearly completed skeletons lay in a long line, head to toe. Many of the bones had been sawed or drilled. There were hacksaws on the wall, even a meat cleaver.

“It took quite a search to find you,” said Golding. “The security chief for your building finally suggested this place.”

“Captain Enote?”

“An older man. An Indian. He said no one can keep up with you.”

“The Captain frets over me,” laughed Miranda. “Just like you do. What brings you here?”

“I came to see you.”

Miranda was politely flattered, then said, “I mean Los Alamos, you were just here a week ago.”

“I came to see you,” Golding repeated seriously.

Miranda lowered her eyes, and her pleasure made Golding feel joyful and loved, but sad, too. This beautiful young woman meant so much to so many people. They liked her. It was stronger than that, more than her genius that drew them. They believed in her. Miranda was blind to it; that was Miranda. She should have had lovers, and Golding was pretty sure she had never had one. She should have had girlfriends and jogging partners and belonged to book clubs. She should have been making group raids on the Santa Fe art scene and breaking boys’ hearts and talking deep talk over long meals. All of that. But she was alone. Minus her father, all Miranda had for family was a frail old lady who showed up in her life once in a blue moon.

“Is everything okay?” Miranda asked.

Everything was not okay. They would get to that, slowly. “What on earth are you doing over here?” Golding asked. “The Captain said this is your latest hangout.”

“I have an idea,” Miranda confided.

“I’d love to hear it.”

“All right. Just give me a minute.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I was finishing something.”

“Take your time. I won’t touch anything.”

“Oh,” said Miranda, “the bones are safe.”

Golding continued her stroll along the aisles. She began to see the wounds. Trauma was not her specialty, but the marks and breaks spoke clearly. Some of these men had lived violent, brutal lives. You could see where fractures had healed or calcium had fused over nicks and cuts on the bone. More glaring were the injuries that had not healed. Golding looked around the large room. These men from Golgotha had died horribly.

She knew about the bones. Everyone did. Visitors had compared the remains to the aftermath of a great battle. But as Golding walked about, few of the injuries correlated with ancient battle. The skulls had not been caved in. Neck vertebrae didn’t display the slice marks of cut throats nor the chop of beheading. Collarbones were not cleaved by swords or axes. She had read that preindustrial warriors commonly displayed more damage to their left, or defensive side, yet the wounds to either arm were random and few.

The unhealed bone injuries were almost exclusively lower extremity. Heel bones had been pierced by spikes. Long leg bones had been hacked, snapped, and bent. A curious wound, one scholars hadn’t thought of before this discovery, was an incision across the front of the knee. Sever the patellar tendon and you got the same result as breaking a man’s thighbone, and with a lot less effort. How terrible, thought Golding. Death on Roman and Jewish crosses resulted from asphyxiation. No matter their agony, these men had struggled hour after hour to push themselves upwards to breathe. Surely some of them had tried to hang down and escape into death. But their bodies had taken over. Life could be such a stubborn vegetable.

Miranda closed a drawer and came over. “There are something like nine thousand bone fragments here. I’m still getting to know who’s who.”

“You’re putting them all together?”

Miranda leaned over and straightened a few finger bones. “People wander in now and then. It’s like a big community jigsaw puzzle for them. They fill in what they can. Then someone else comes and fills in a little more.”

They reached a set of metal shelves. It was a small museum of execution tools: a rusted hammer head, bent nails, plaques of “keeper” wood driven over the foot or hand to keep the flesh and muscle from tearing free.

“These always get me,” Miranda said. She picked up a small terracotta ampoule from a collection of thirty or forty. “Tear vials. Their women left them by the crosses.” She laid it back on the shelf. “I’ve tried scraping for a sample.”

“A sample?”

“You know, genetic. Female. All I get is salt.” Miranda murmured, “sorrow.”

“What is it you’re looking for?”

“Same thing as everybody else. Patient Zero.”

Golding didn’t have to ask which Patient Zero. No one even paid attention to the lesser contagions anymore. Doomsayers were predicting Corfu might be bigger than
Yersinia pestis.
Little did they know. At thirty-five percent mortality, the Black Death was a case of the sniffles compared to whatever this bug was.

“Since when did you join epidemics?”

“Epidemics kind of joined me,” Miranda answered. “Some of the other divisions came and asked if I could help with different aspects.”

“I don’t see the connection.” Alpha Lab specialized in genome studies and cloning, not virus hunting. “You think the virus is still alive in the bones?”

“Not anymore. We know it’s not. Not in these bones. Molecular Pathology descended on them like termites, putting holes in everything, chopping specimens into splinters. They gave up looking a month ago and threw everything in storage here.”

That’s what Miranda had meant by
the bones are safe.

“They’re still trying to get their hands on other genetic material from the period,” said Miranda. “But it won’t be coming from Jerusalem. Not after what happened to those Navy kids.”

Kids.
She sounded a hundred years old. Maybe a handful of the sailors had been her age. The rest had been veteran soldiers and scientists, men and women twice her age and older. Golding had lost some good friends to the operation.

Three months ago, the Navy had sent a carrier group back into the Mediterranean. The ships carried a rare alliance of specialists from the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. The mission was televised, Gulf War–style, 24/7. It was supposed to have been a slam dunk for American know-how, a quick end to The End, as some tabloids had dubbed Corfu.

People everywhere had watched the operation unfold. The broadcasts were full of subtle drama and endless sidebars on disease control, treatments in progress, and barrier nursing procedures. On deck, the crews manned their stations in cotton masks, paper booties, and latex gloves. Vessels deployed throughout the hot zone with specific targets. They approached the port cities of Greece, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt as if World War III were about to erupt. But the cradles of civilization were desolate.

With the warships floating off shore, teams of virologists, veterinarians, entomologists, physicians, and zoologists had been airlifted to land to began their systematic hunt. Over television, the cities looked like empty movie sets. The peace was surreal. In Jerusalem, the walls of the Old City glowed like molten gold in the summer sun. Massive swarms of seabirds circled the metro areas, choosing their feasts. Combatants no longer fought for the holy places. There were no pilgrims, no prophets, no merchants, no children. Only tourists dressed in biohazard “moon” suits.

Their goal was simple: find the virus…or prion…whatever type of microbe Corfu turned out to be. It had to have a natural reservoir, a place of origin. So far, the footprints were pure science fiction. Epidemiologists had traced the contagion to an eccentric Greek billionaire’s mansion on Corfu. In time-honored tradition, the disease had been named after its point of outbreak. It was now known that the Greek had collected—and opened—Christian relics, and routinely sent their contents to various labs for analysis. Thanks to lab precautions and swift government action, the earliest emergence of Corfu had been contained to the cities which held the labs. Investigators quickly compared lab notes and pinpointed the source, a Roman-era glass phial with bits of human remains. Diseased remains. The problem was more complicated than that. There was a source behind the source.

The contagion may have emerged—in this century—on an island named Corfu, but that was not its natural reservoir. Nor was the relic, which had traveled from country to country over two thousand years. No one knew the relic’s provenance, only its mythology. Ready to believe anything, the public had reached its own conclusions. The relic must have held some part of the historical Jesus. The disease was, therefore, a divine punishment. The proof lay in the dictionary. The Latin
plaga
referred to an affliction, calamity or evil sent by God.

Divine or not, it was becoming clear that the natural reservoir was not just a place, but a time. All portions of the relic had long since disappeared in the international chaos. But according to lab reports, the Greek’s wood samples had been dated to the early first century.

It was said that the Tartars besieging Kaffa in the year 1347 had catapulted corpses infested with bubonic plague over the city walls. Corfu was the equivalent. A disease had been catapulted through time, from the year zero into the twenty-first century. In its original form, twenty centuries ago, the virus had apparently behaved like a normal virus. It killed, but it also left survivors who could then transmit it to other hosts. With time, contagions tended to evolve a working relationship with their host population. From syphilis to malaria, once-lethal diseases grew less malevolent. Killer viruses like chickenpox became mere childhood diseases. Even AIDS and Ebola and the fictitious Andromeda Strain left survivors.

So far, Corfu was different. Captured and contained as part of a relic two thousand years ago, the virus had apparently mutated. It had grown
more
lethal. Mathematically, the odds were just as great that a virus would become more deadly than less deadly. Until this point in time, mankind had been lucky, that was all. Now, in an age of super technology, experts refused to believe their own statistics. But the hard fact was that to this date not one survivor had been located in any of the afflicted countries. Before Corfu made its appearance, only rabies had carried that kind of mortality rate.

Trying to locate survivors had been a small part of the Navy operation. A survivor was important because he or she would have developed an antibody to combat the virus, or antigen. With the antibody identified, scientists could at least be creating blood tests for screening out carriers. A test, or diagnostic, would go a long way towards protecting still healthy populations. So far that line of investigation was a bust.

But, once upon a time, there
had
been survivors. This was a matter of logic. The virus had afflicted at least one individual in the Levant two thousand years ago. Possibly, while bottled in the relic, his contaminated tissue had evolved into modern-day Corfu. If the virus had infected him, it would surely have infected others. And yet, in the surviving histories of Palestine and Egypt, there were no reports of devastating plagues during that same period, certainly nothing with symptoms like Corfu presented. Tacitus and Josephus, among other historians living in the first century, had been much too thorough to miss such a detail. And so far, with the bug still eluding their view, the paleopathologists and other researchers could only guess when it made its genetic trespass upon
H. sapiens.

Somewhere along the line, the virus had jumped species and started using humans as a host. But it had not caused a noticeable die-off. That suggested two things: the virus had probably started out as a benign invader, and some of its victims had probably recovered. The problem for modern researchers was that these survivors had lived two millenia ago. Enter the Year Zero bones.

While entomologists collected insects in the Mediterranean basin, and zoologists trapped rats, mice, and bats, and pathologists took tissue samples from what remained of plague victims in the streets, and Navy SEALS conducted house to house searches for living survivors, a team of Seabees had excavated the famous Golgotha pit in the caves beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They didn’t waste time. A bulldozer scraped away the upper building. A backhoe clawed big scoops of bone-rich soil into a sea container. On board the USS
Truman,
the container had been emptied, the soil sifted, and the bones vaccuum packaged for air delivery to the United States. Within twelve hours, scientists at Los Alamos had been rooting through them for traces of either the original virus or its antibody.