Year Zero (17 page)

“I’m sorry about that, Edward.”

“No, please, don’t mistake me. No self-pity here. Only an explanation. Since I was old enough to think, I’ve been driven by one realization. What is happening to me doesn’t need to happen to anyone else. That’s why I pursued genetics. To spare the innocents from my fate. Now I am placed in the path of this other disease, and I can help. I want to be part of the solution, too.”

Golding wanted to change her mind about him. And yet he had retracted nothing. He meant for the human experimentation to go on. “The end does not justify the means,” she stated.

“I thought it might come to this,” Cavendish said. He tapped a key on his console. A moment later, his phone rang. He picked it up. “Yes,” he replied. He looked at Golding. “Someone wants to see you.”

She caught Abbot’s surprised frown. They were going off script here.

“I told you to leave Miranda out of this,” she said. Who else could it be?

“It’s not Miranda,” Cavendish said. “This won’t take long.”

Someone knocked at the door.

“Come,” spoke Cavendish. The door opened. There was a noise, wheels rolling.

Golding didn’t turn to see the visitor. She kept her head high. To her side, Abbot pivoted in his chair. She saw confusion in his eyes, then shock.

“Elise?” a voice called.

She grew very still. Her heart squeezed. She didn’t want to turn. She didn’t want to know. She turned.

“Victor,” she whispered.

Her husband, the father of her children, lay on the gurney, too feeble to move. It wasn’t just gravity’s weight. They had fished him from the tank and docked his hair and clipped his nails. But already his hair was creeping onto the pillow. His nails were coiling outwards. What entered had been a young man. Already he was fifty. The aging was so rapid his body quivered with the metamorphosis.

“Where am I?” he whispered.

She stroked his head and the hair pulled out in her fingers. Sixty. Liver spots blossomed on his hands. Seventy. His face was hollowing out. Ninety. He blinked, utterly disoriented. “You’re with me,” she said, and kissed his forehead.

“I don’t understand,” he said with a birdlike voice.

“It’s okay, Victor. I do,” she whispered. “I love you so much.”

“Is this a dream?”

He died.

Even then the accelerated genes did not slow. The metabolism had momentum. He lost flesh. His eyes….

She felt her heart go. She draped herself across the body, holding on to the far edge of the gurney.

“What have you done?” she heard Abbot shouting at Cavendish. His voice was so far away.

“We obtained all the proper permits to exhume the body,” Cavendish said. “A few cells, that’s all we needed.”

“I won’t be implicated in this,” Abbot was shouting.

She listened. Such horror. Her grip failed. She slid to the floor.

“Elise!” Abbot knelt over her. He was trying to cradle her. “Call for help,” he demanded.

With the last of her strength, she pushed him away.

F
EBRUARY

I
t felt to Miranda as if she had lost her mother all over again. But mourning had fallen from fashion, and so she did not cry.

Nearly everyone at Los Alamos had lost someone by now, either to the pandemic directly—especially the foreign scientists—or to the circumstances surrounding it. The plague had still not muscled its way onto American shores. But as medical stockpiles dwindled and physicians were sent off to various “beachheads” along the seaboards and Mexican border, other diseases were beginning to prey on the population. Tuberculosis had made a major comeback. Polio was rearing its head. There were cholera outbreaks up and down the Florida peninsula. Mortality was said to be soaring among the very old and very young. Health care was in such collapse that people were dying out there from dog bites, rusty nails, and broken bones. Curiously all of the suffering, death, and chaos had come to be lumped together. In one way or another, every random event was driven by the same single mechanism. That was their definition of the plague. You only had to say the word, and it explained any misery, any misfortune. Even the death of an old woman from her second heart attack.

Elise had toppled into the mass grave in their minds. Los Alamos had lost its leader, but gained a new one in Cavendish. Miranda made her grief invisible. As a courtesy to others, you were expected to bear up and carry on. There was work to be done. She did her work. In the face of death, she threw herself into creating new life in the cloning works of Alpha Lab. Sometimes her sadness could not be forgotten, though. That was how she came to begin surfing the plague.

It had become a minor obsession for many of them, a form of recreation, surfing the plague, as they called their electronic hitchhiking, watching the world unravel. Miranda thought of it as a long-distance death watch, and had avoided it for months. But now she felt drawn to know what was coming.

From the safety of their mesa top, equipped with the latest communication technology, surfers tapped into the storm of dispatches, pleas, rumors, and broadcasts being launched by victims around the world like messages in bottles. One only had to dial in. With a few keystrokes, Miranda could patch into security cameras mounted in Swiss or Argentine stores or banks, peer through television cameras fixed to the masts of legendary skyscrapers, revive phantom signals lingering in distant computers, or download imagery from satellites. There were eyes everywhere. The sky was filled with voices. All you had to do was choose what you wanted to see, who you wanted to listen to.

People collected their finds like souvenirs, taping or downloading them, swapping them or jealously hoarding them, making websites, talking about their latest spectacle over coffee. Everyone had their own tastes, their personal thresholds. Some described communing for weeks with desperate strangers in the deep of night twelve time zones away. Others went for grand, epic views of whole cities going still. One woman was conducting a cyber-romance with an astronaut in the space station. Clubs formed to reconstruct dead cities from their electronic relics, patching together images of empty streets, finding glimpses of buildings reflected in mirrors or store windows, entering apartments, viewing books on bedstands, the remnants of last meals, even the final videos watched by occupants. Some people made a hobby of collecting the lives of victims.

Miranda started by going where they had gone. She toured their cities, eavesdropped on their chat rooms, sampled their plague biographies, replayed images that were months old. She followed the exoduses from foreign metropolises into the red sands of the Rajasthan Desert, into the Australian outback, over the Atlas Range and into the Sahara, and along the railways into the great forests of northern Russia. From geosynchronous orbit, the halted trains and traffic looked like dead serpents. She tracked fifty-mile-long columns of refugees turned back by armies in the middle of nowhere, at borders that were no more than lines on maps, the last vestiges of the nation-state. Bloody food riots in Sao Paulo, London, and Berlin; the burning of Vienna; street orgies in Rio de Janero: With unbelievable speed, the plague had mushroomed into a tidal wave and sent panic ahead of itself. The order of things did not decay so much as vanish. Old rivals barely had time to swarm across borders, declare revolutions, or machete each other, before the virus swept them under.

Miranda traveled through the horrors and went on, searching for something, though she did not know what. There was no lack of partners and places to explore. As the hyper-disease advanced and nations fell, one simply moved on to the next victim, the next landscape.

At first she felt dishonest, or at least contradictory. Voyeurism is always parasitic, and here they were, parasite hunters. On the other hand, their curiosity was natural. History was being made, or unmade. Everyone wanted to be a witness. There was comfort in that, even a sort of immunity. To be a witness implied they would outlast what they were witnessing. Watching, they could remain above and outside of what they watched. It was a form of pornography, but also at one level, a duty. Even as they went rooting through the impending death of mankind, they were memorizing what had been forgotten, seeing what human eyes no longer saw. They were gathering the last of remembrance.

One night Captain Enote, the head of security in her lab, slipped her a gift, a pink stick’em note with satellite coordinates. He had been one of the few to attend Elise’s funeral, despite having met her only once. He had showed up in a jacket and tie and stayed at the back, and did not make eye contact with Miranda, though he’d come for her benefit. This was the first time she’d spoken to him since. “Try this,” he said. “Private stock. Africa. Part of the Navy recon. Keep it to yourself, please. It’s supposed to be classified.”

The Captain was retired military, a former Marine, and it didn’t surprise Miranda that he had some inside connection to the Navy expedition. She knew only the bare bones of its mission: to inherit the earth. With America fast becoming the last and only nation left intact, her fleets had been dispatched to investigate and catalogue whatever remained on the other continents. The aircraft carriers with their reconnaisance planes were central to the probe. They hovered off foreign coasts, documenting the state of the cities and countryside, their aircraft overflying the roads and rivers, recording any remaining military assets, gathering data on the condition of gold, copper, platinum, uranium, and other precious mineral mines; judging the condition of shipping and land transport lanes; and generally mapping the world from scratch.

She expected a soldier’s scene, fighter jets screaming off the deck. But when Miranda finally found the spare minute to link up, her screen abruptly filled with green mountains and green rivers. Her minute turned into an hour. The land moved beneath her in slow, lush waves. It was a paradise down there.

Miranda felt like she had entered a state of grace. Here and there she caught sight of the plane’s shadow casting ahead. Otherwise she might have been drifting on a cloud top. The forest gave way to gorges and lakes. Thousands of flamingoes surged up in a long, sinuous queue, and it was like watching sound waves in pink. She passed above a bull elephant soloing toward the secret horizon.

Next morning, she found the Captain. “I could have been dreaming,” she said.

“Thought you might like that,” he said. “I’ve been following her from the start. A lot of months now.”

“Her?” said Miranda.

“The pilot,” he said.

There was so much to ask that she didn’t get the woman’s name, and after that her namelessness became part of the journey. She had read somewhere that monks transcribing texts in medieval times purposely kept themselves anonymous, and that’s how Miranda came to regard the pilot, not as a vehicle, but a hidden hand.

The Captain explained how the battle group’s two nuclear submarines and two battle cruisers had peeled off to begin exploring the coast of South America last October. The aircraft carrier that his pilot was flying from, the
Truman,
had gone to Africa. They had begun their reconnaisance at the beginning: zero and zero, zero degrees latitude, zero degress longitude, in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Gabon. “Heart of darkness country,” said the Captain. From there on, it had been like the movie
On the Beach,
but without the beach. Physical contact with the land mass was forbidden.

The pilot’s Diamondback squadron had four F-14s, each mounted with a pod of digital cameras and an infrared scanner. One at a time, they would head due east bearing parallel to the equator, then return west along a slightly lower parallel, all the while beaming their data back to the intelligence and map people on board the
Truman
…and inadvertently to the Captain, and now Miranda. Since October, four months ago, the carrier had worked its way south around the Cape of Good Hope and gotten almost as far north as Kenya.

“You missed the worst of it,” said the Captain. In the space of an African summer, a half billion souls had vanished. Week after week, the reconnaisance teams had explored. The hand of man was everywhere. Wellheads still pumped oil in Gabon. Villages with thatched roofs lay like setpieces waiting for their actors. In Capetown the picket fences stood bright white. A suburb in Johannesburg still had electricity and its street lights burned bright at midday. Now only the animals were left.

Night after night, Miranda traveled on the wings of the Navy pilot. To do their recon well, she learned, one had to loiter, cruising a few thousand feet off the ground to give the cameras hanging under the fuselage the best views. Flying at 300 knots and slower also saved fuel, which maximized their daily exploring range. The pilot rarely spoke, usually letting her navigator radio the
Truman
when they had reached the tip of their daily journey and were heading back to their “boat.” When she did speak, Miranda liked the woman’s no-nonsense voice. It sounded vaguely familiar, the accent, the economy of syllables.

Working northward, the Tomcat flew above emerald green coffee plantations and lakes so still you could see the jet rippling in the water. A cheetah was not distracted as it ran down a gazelle. They circled volcanoes in Rwanda. Africa became her nightly prayer. Miranda would log on to the recon for an hour or two, then fall asleep, comforted. Strangely, the closer the plague came, the further away it seemed. The havoc had grown over. Only beauty was left.

Miranda was certain the pilot had no idea she had electronic passengers watching from the other side of the planet. But then one night she announced that the
Truman
had accomplished its mission. “We’ve finished our part of the map,” she said softly. “If you can hear me, I’m coming home,
datchu.”
Miranda didn’t know that last word, but it lacked the jagged consonance of military diction. It seemed tender and personal, and she wondered who the woman could have been talking to.

The pilot was a stranger to her, nameless, faceless. But the news filled Miranda with joy. “She’s coming home,” Miranda told the Captain next morning. It was unnecessary. His eyes were beaming. That was her first hint.

“Datchu,”
she repeated the word from last night. “Is that you?”

“My wife and I, we still call her
kola t’sana,”
the Captain answered. “Our little chile. Coming home at last.”