Year Zero (28 page)

“But any one of these survivors could be our answer,” Miranda retorted. “They could be our future.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, the U.S. Navy got swallowed looking for survivors like these.” The scientists turned to Cavendish at the far end of the table, a frail stem with burning eyes. “Our armadas have disappeared. Our military assets have dwindled. Our wings are gone.”

Cavendish lifted a hand at the satellite image on screen. “Even our eyes are failing. We’re getting information from satellites that are falling to earth. Do you understand, Miranda? We can no longer project ourselves into the world. We’ve lost the capability. We don’t own the night. We don’t own the day. It takes a major armed expedition just to reach into Albuquerque for a few hours. Calcutta!” he snorted. The luminous green figure on screen fed another stick into his little fire. “All this proves is that there’s other life in the universe, no more, no less.”

Miranda felt the others looking at her. Once more, she was the sole voice of dissent, or optimism, or whatever she was. For an instant, she resented their cowardice. But she understood it, too. They had families, many of them. They were mortal, and Cavendish was ruthless. Their job was science, not martyrdom. “So we give up, is that it?” she snapped.

“We work with what we have,” Cavendish said. “And when the time comes, we retreat to the WIPP sanctuary. Just as your father planned. This is a distraction. It would give people false hope.”

When,
Miranda fumed,
not if.
Retreat. To the sanctuary. Into her father’s underworld. She glanced around, trying to measure their discouragement and fear. These days they believed in asylum more than they believed in the cure…and it wasn’t even built. The subterranean sanctuary was still under construction. Originally designed to be a graveyard for nuclear waste, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—WIPP—was being converted into a vast hideaway for the entire populace of Los Alamos. Twelve stories of chambers and floors were being carved from a salt dome two thousand feet beneath the desert bordering Texas. It would be equipped with lab facilities. Research would continue while they sheltered beneath the virus world. Someday, perhaps decades from now, they were supposed to emerge with their cure.

But to Miranda and a small contingent of others, the WIPP sanctuary was a terrible mistake. There was no way its labs could match what they already had at Los Alamos. The quarters would be pinched and sunless, an eternal night. Also, it would be vulnerable to even a single strand of the virus. In such close quarters, the plague could devour them in a single bite. Anyway, it was wrong to be talking about retreat. “We have a mission,” she protested.

“We have to keep our hopes realistic,” Cavendish said. “Some things are possible, Miranda. Some things are not.”

Just then Maples’s phone beeped. He took the call, then looked around at them. “That was the latest count. We’re up to thirty-nine survivor sightings.”

“Worldwide?” It was the blonde woman from Johannesburg. “My god, is that all? Thirty-nine people…where there were once billions?”

The woman’s country had been killed off long ago. Miranda understood that about her. Defeatism came naturally to her, though that didn’t fully explain her tone of ridicule. She, and probably most of the others in the room, were cueing off of Cavendish, for now displaying their allegiance. Then Miranda saw the woman exchange an admiring glance, and it was not with Cavendish, but with his silent clone, stationed behind the wheelchair. So, thought Miranda, the rumors were true. The clone had bedded her, too.
But who was he?

“There will be more than thirty-nine,” Miranda doggedly pronounced.

“A few hundred?” the woman sniffed.

“One in a million, or two million, or ten million,” said Miranda. “It’s better than nothing.”

“Oh, but you see you’re only talking about life.” The woman pointed at the thermal caveman squatting among the ruins of Calcutta. “If that is our future, then civilization is finished.”

“No,” said Miranda. “Not as long as Los Alamos is still alive.” Her defiance was beginning to sound like cheerleading to her, and she was desperately making it up as she went along. But someone had to say something. “We are a city on a hill,” she declared. “A city of light.”

Where had that come from, city of light?
They were all looking at her. She wanted to believe their silence was contemplative, but knew they were embarrassed for her. Miranda’s cheeks were hot. “If we can’t go to find the survivors,” she finished, “then maybe they will come to us. Someday.”

“A good swimmer, is he?” joked Cavendish.
Touché.
The oceans were once again vast barriers.

“There will be survivors in America, too,” Miranda stated. She could feel herself swaying in the breeze, far, far out on a limb of her own making. “Once the virus has passed through, they’ll appear.”

“Like moths, would that be?” said Cavendish. “To the light?”

“I won’t quit,” Miranda said.

It was the wrong thing to say. They thought she was accusing them. She was, but not to drive them away. To inspire them.
With insults?
She sighed. She was no good at this. Their eyes glazed. When she looked, Cavendish was beaming at her.

A
UGUST 11

I
t had always been deathly still on her visits before. But tonight, five stories deep, the Orphanage sounded like the full moon rising, every wild throat up and screaming. As she stormed along the hallway, Miranda could feel the clones’ frenzy vibrating through the steel walls. Her anger rose.

They howled like banshees. Some hurled themselves against the stainless steel doors. Others hid in corners or under their beds. A wild-eyed face hammered against the narrow Plexiglas. Another window was flecked with blood.

Two guards waited at the far end by a locked door. The plastic slider read 01-01N. Clone One. Version One. Neandertal.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Nathan Lee went in,” the big weightlifter volunteered. “He sat down. The kid blew up. Then the rest of them went off.”

Miranda peered through the three-inch window. The view was blurry and brown. Her cell was a nightmare of shit walls and voodoo handprints. The child was caked with her own feces. But tonight there was blood on the girl’s hands. Blood on the walls. To her relief it was Nathan Lee’s blood, not the child’s. He sat at her feet. She had all but lost her voice screaming. It sounded like rust being scraped from the walls.

“What has he done to her?”

“Nothing. He went in. He sat down. That’s all.”

That was everything. The girl had been stripped of her room with the aspen outside the window and a rainbow on the wall. They had taken away her toys and beloved crayons, locked her in this cage deep beneath the ground. She was a bird with broken wings.

The child had no world but the borders of her cell. She never strayed into its center. Perimeter walking, it was called, a symptom of autism, an endless journey of walls. And now, Miranda saw, Nathan Lee had dared to trespass upon what little she possessed. He had blocked her path with his body. He had stolen her mindless walkabout.

“Who let him in?”

The guards were frightened by her anger. They had never seen her like this. “I turned my back,” the one with a jar cut said. “He opened the door.”

She looked again through the window slot.

“He could infect her.”

“We discussed it. Nathan Lee said, what’s worse, to be sick or be dead?”

“You
discussed
it?”

They quailed.

“How long has he been in there?” she said.

Jarhead consulted his watch. “Twenty-three minutes.”

The Captain arrived. He peered through the slot. “Great,” he muttered, “he went and did it.”

“You knew he might go in there?” she said.

“I had a feeling.”

“What happened to ‘no contact’?” She’d never talked down to the Captain. She couldn’t help herself.

“He was warned.”

“She’s been through too much.” She was ready to hit somebody. “He’s gone. Do you hear me?” She heard herself, talking like Cavendish.

“He’s on our side, Miranda.”

“How do you know that?”

The Captain peeked at the scene inside. He shook his head. “The man is taking his punishment.”

The girl had the strength of a teenage boy. For twenty minutes, Nathan Lee had been sitting there while she beat and clawed at him. His face was swollen. His lips and nose were bleeding. His shirt was in rags. Not once did he raise an arm to ward away the blows. All he did was keep on reading.

Now Miranda saw it. He had brought his storybook with him. So that was it, he’d gone over the edge. Unable to get at Ochs, deprived of his own daughter, he had abducted this one. “He’s traumatized the whole ward,” she said. “Listen to them.”

“I hear. They get like this sometimes.”

“We’ve got to get him out of there.”

Nathan Lee had deceived her. She had deceived herself. The gravity and pureness of his quest had lulled her. It was only a matter of time before he stole some supplies and took Old Paint and vanished again. Miranda took that for granted. But this was the last thing she’d expected from him.

“What do you have in mind?”

“You have people,” she said. “Send them in.”

The Captain frowned. “She’s out of control. Send in the Posse, they’ll have to take her down, too.” The Posse was their crash team, big men with overwhelming force. “She might get hurt.”

“Dart him then. Gas him. The bastard.” She had never been so angry. Nathan Lee had no right to go crazy like this. He was supposed to have been stronger, not just another lamed spirit.

“She might get hurt,” the Captain repeated.

Miranda breathed out.

“She’ll tire out soon,” the Captain reassured her. “They always do.”

Miranda heard the sureness in his voice. Her expertise was the silent mechanisms inside the human cell, his was the violence of wild men, and a feral child. The bedlam rocked her. “How often are they like this?” she asked.

“Now and then. We keep a few sedated. The rest, we let them purge their devils. It’s good for the soul.”

Miranda clenched her fists on either side of the window slot. She tried to remember how long it had been since her last visit with the child.
Seven weeks?
She was a busy woman. That was her excuse. But the truth was this metal underworld, this place she had created to conceal the damned and the medical leftovers, was unbearable to her.

“No sense standing here,” the Captain said. “We can keep an eye on things over the monitor.”

He led her to a darkened room filled with banks of monitors. It was dim and quiet in here. Away from the pandemonium, she began to collect herself.

As she passed the screens, Miranda saw men shouting, clutching their ears, pounding the walls, sitting like catatonic hermits, hopping up and down like apes. Some just lay on their backs staring at the ceiling. The Captain gave her a chair in front of the Neandertal girl’s two screens. Underneath someone had taped a name with a flower. It said Tara.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s Tibetan,” said the Captain. “Nathan Lee said it means Mother Goddess.”

Now she saw other screens with Scotch tape names. “Where did he come up with these?” But it was obvious. The Year Zero thing had gone to his head. It looked like he’d gone grocery shopping through the Bible. There were a Matthew, a Hosea, two Ezekiels, Micah, Zechariah, three Johns, one Eleazar ben Yair, and even a Lazarus. Now she saw the bones and relic fragments lying before each screen, like offerings upon separate altars.

“They’re the real names. He wanted to surprise you.”

“Don’t tell me he’s gone in and talked with them, too?”

“He just listens over the cell mikes. Sometimes they whisper to themselves. Or they rant and rave. Or announce themselves. It’s mostly Aramaic, he says. He spends a lot of time down here. Every day. At night, too. It’s catching. He’s got us all doing it. Once in a while we’ll make out a name or a word.”

Someone had pinned to the bulletin board a short vocabulary list in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, with the English translation. A bookshelf held a small library of video tapes with the names, numbers, and dates, and books on archaeology and museum collections. Nathan Lee had turned the guard room into a university cram session.

Miranda was startled. “How long has this been going on?”

“You told him to study the boys. He went at the task.”

“Study them, not her.”

“It was a matter of time, Miranda. Her screens are right here. One of the guards left them switched them on by accident. After that Nathan Lee got a little…remote.”

“You know what he’s doing, don’t you? I’m sorry he lost his daughter….” She trailed off. Maybe Nathan Lee and the Captain had talked about that, too. She doubted it: two stoics in the same space at the same time…perfect silence.

“The thing is,” said the Captain, “he does belong in there.”

“No, he does not. I don’t care about his Himalayan connection.”

“He told me how he found her sitting on a ledge. It was somewhere near Mount Everest. She was all alone. He said she chose the place for the way the mountains lit at sundown.”

Miranda looked at the screen. The girl’s frenzy was ebbing.

“You’re wrong about him. He didn’t go in to take care of his loneliness,” said the Captain. “He went for hers.”

Miranda turned her head away.

The Captain handed her a headset. “This dial’s for the volume.” He pointed, and left her.

Miranda put the earphones on, and the girl’s raspy screams pierced her. The Captain was right. The tantrum was wearing her down.

Through the noise, Miranda could hear Nathan Lee’s voice calmly reading. It was some story about the wind and a bird. He turned a page.

Now Miranda saw how he gripped the book in his two hands. His knuckles were white. The beating hurt. He was holding on for dear life. Still, he kept the book tilted so that she could see the pictures.

Miranda sat in the darkness before the screen. At last the girl did wear out. Her arms drifted down to her sides. The screams dwindled. Miranda could almost read her thoughts.
Now what?

Nathan Lee kept reading. His voice had a lilt to it. After a few minutes, the girl edged closer, a matter of inches. She had that innocence of children, and craned her neck, trying to see the pictures. Ever so slowly, he lowered one arm.

“Don’t you do it,” Miranda murmured at the screen. He was going to grab her. It was a trap.

And then it happened.

The girl sat on his lap.

It was not, Miranda told herself, an act of affection. She sat on him like a piece of furniture. Her eyes were intent on the pictures. He was an object. A tool.

His voice softened. When he said
hush, hush,
it was the sound of the wind, and her eyes flared wider.

“Well, now,” the Captain said behind her. Miranda became aware of other guards watching, too. The biggest men had padded shields and helmets and armor.

“He tricked her,” Miranda said.

“Good trick,” said the Captain.

Miranda lost track of time. Gradually Nathan Lee strayed from the text. He kept turning the pages slowly. Syllable by syllable, one picture at a time, he worked into a kind of song. It was a nonsense song without real words, practically a chant. Then Miranda realized his drawn-out notes were full of vibrations. He was making his chest resound against her back.

Miranda watched in disbelief. He was enchanting her.

The girl laid her head against his shoulder.

“God,” whispered a guard. “By god.”

Her eyes closed.

She fell asleep.

Nathan Lee went on with the song. His face was grotesque. One eye was swelling shut. The camera caught a single tear squeezing loose. It tracked down his cheekbone. He wanted to cry. He was happy. Miranda could see it. But it would have woken the girl, and so he governed himself.

He laid the book to one side. He wrapped his arms around her. She nestled into his warmth. He smelled her hair.

The Orphanage quieted. Miranda glanced at the other monitors, and the clones eased their clamor.

After an hour, Nathan Lee laid the girl on the bare floor, still sleeping. The battle had exhausted her. He crept to the door on his hands and knees. Miranda and the Captain and his looming guards went into the hallway and waited silently.

The Captain softly opened the door, and Miranda nearly gagged on the reek of fresh sewage. Nathan Lee came through at their feet. The Captain eased the door shut. They had to help Nathan Lee stand. The girl had raked his cheek to the bone. His good eye was bloodshot and seeping. He kept his arms folded against his ribs. She’d injured his neck and back muscles.

No one said anything. Nathan Lee blinked as if emerging from a deep cave. They parted for him to leave. He shuffled like an old man.

Miranda spoke. “You had no right.”

“Yeah, I did.” He was thirsty. “Solace, remember?”

Miranda dogged him. “You had no idea what you were doing.”

“I talked with a speech language pathologist,” he said. “She said you don’t touch a child like this lightly. Touch her too gently, it only triggers a startle reflex. I didn’t know that before. The lady told me it had to be a deep embrace. That’s all that works.”

“I don’t care who you talked to. You had no permission.” Tears welled in her eyes. “This is cruel,” she said. “You opened up her heart. Now what?”

He had to turn his whole body with his head drooped down. The child had torn a tuft from his scalp. “Let’s just do the best we can,” he said. Returning the favor, she knew. She had made him part of things. Now he made her part, too.

W
HEN
T
ARA WOKE
next morning, he was there again, showered and stitched and wearing clean clothes. His face was ugly with lumps and bruises. He hurt. But he was there.

Her eyes opened, and they were dark blue. One of her baby teeth had fallen out in the last few weeks. What must she have thought of that, all alone?
The tooth fairy’s here now,
he thought.