Year Zero (34 page)

O
NE
W
EEK
L
ATER

F
ew of the crucified men talked about the manner of their dying or what came after. Not unnaturally, the threatened citizens of Los Alamos were burning to know about it. They pestered Nathan Lee on the streets, by e-mail or phone, asking him to ask more about that “death thing.” They wanted some glimpse of what it was like, “the king of terrors” as the Bible put it, “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands for sleep.” Nathan Lee dreaded to ask, though. He had passed among the bones. He had heard them whistle.

Over the summer Los Alamos had largely lost touch with America. Information technology had not decayed limb by neat regional limb, as some had predicted. The crash had been catastrophic. One day they had transmissions from St. George and Lincoln and Laramie, frightened talking heads, meandering video tours. The next, their eyes were blind. The transmissions just ceased. There were sporadic bursts from shortwave guerrillas, and the satellites were jam-packed with backdated images and data they had yet to excavate. But it was suddenly like nightfall out there, as if America had plunged into the darkness of Asia and Africa and Europe. Even so, Nathan Lee clung to his hope. He refused to believe silence meant emptiness. People—towns, enclaves, tribes—were in hiding, that was all. There was life out there. And his daughter. Life, that was the question he wanted answers for, not death.

The few times he did ask about the clones’ deaths and what lay beyond, the men would evade answering. “You know as well as me,” they would say. It wasn’t that they’d forgotten. Their faces grew dark. Their eyes smoldered. They remembered, but did not want to. With time, Nathan Lee comprehended that hanging from the cross had been a gruesome humiliation. No matter how much agony they had endured on the cross, it was their memory of the shame that still hurt them most. Naked and reviled, they had been stripped of their reputations, their names, and their lands. Their families had been damned by their deaths, and they knew it. And so they glossed over the dying part.

Nathan Lee was struck by their dignity. As their scribe, he listened to them dictate letters home about their new life, and they generally treated their rebirth as a grand achievement, or a fresh start, a new land, an opportunity. They viewed themselves as pioneers, or at least fellow travelers. Their imprisonment by strange demons was simply part of the journey. It wouldn’t last forever. They acted as if their herds and orchards and businesses were still intact back in the old life. Some went into great detail about how they wanted their wives or brothers or sons to attend to daily affairs in their absence. “Pay no more than three shekels,” one instructed his wife, “and be sure not to speak with Elias. I never trusted his eyes. And whatever you do, don’t invite him here.”

All day long, Nathan Lee sat with his back against the tree, listening to their stories, taking notes. By the fifth week, he could understand so much of their language that Izzy was freed for hours at a stretch. This suited Izzy, who enjoyed slumming among the clones. The courtyard would suddenly ring with laughter, and usually Izzy was at the center of it. Later he would try to explain the jokes to Nathan Lee. Often they had something to do with talking fish or traveling salesmen and farmer’s daughters, all of which had existed in one form or another two thousand years ago.

Periodically Nathan Lee got up to walk around and stretch his muscles. This morning Joshua, a slight man with long fingers and toes, was describing his part in a great battle. Mordechai, an ugly man with huge ears, was delivering his daily boast about seducing a Roman centurion’s wife. For anyone who would listen, he detailed her round hips and her moans of ecstasy. Micah was declaring his wealth once again, a herd of sheep that, he’d decided, must surely have increased from fifty to five hundred by now.

“Weren’t any of them plain murderers or thieves?” Nathan Lee wondered to Izzy.

“You noticed that, too?” said Izzy. “I’ve never met so many patriots, lords, political prisoners, and martyrs of the faith.” It was Kathmandu all over again, a cauldron of fictions and realities, disgrace and glory.

Nathan Lee’s favorites remained the loners who kept to themselves. They acted as if they had no use for the bragging, nor for sending letters. They stood by the fire, ate the food, circled the yard, but rarely talked. Among these was the fugitive. In Nathan Lee’s opinion, he had the most to talk about, for he had glimpsed the world outside their prison. But so far he had volunteered only his name, Ben. Though he never spoke about his escape, the other prisoners had figured out that much about him. It was written all over his flesh.

Escape was becoming a popular topic. Eyes were constantly hunting along the tops of the walls. Unaware that Nathan Lee and Izzy were, in effect, their jailers, and that the yard was wired with microphones, they openly discussed ways of getting out. Nathan Lee discovered that John’s picture of a ship disguised deep grooves that could be used for footholds.

One afternoon a small delegation approached Ben like supplicants, and Nathan Lee roamed closer, curious. They addressed the man with respect, as
maal-paa-naa,
or teacher. “What is it like beyond the walls?” they asked him.

“There is a city. A metal city. Then there is the wilderness,” Ben gruffly answered.

“Is there water? Are their wolves?”

“It is a dead land,” he answered. “Even the trees are dead.”

“Are there villages?”

“All dead.”

“We’re making preparations,” they invited him.

“What would you do out there?”

“Find our homes, what else?”

He snorted at them.

“Help us,
maal-paa-naa.”

He turned his back to them and walked away.

Nathan Lee explained to the Captain about the escape talk, just in case. He didn’t want the guards overreacting. “It’s only talk,” he said, “and they trust me. If anything develops, I’ll hear about it. We can head it off then.”

The Captain was not alarmed. “Nice to see a bit of starch in them,” he said.

M
IRANDA HEARD ABOUT
the escape plotting. She brought it up one evening near the edge of the roof of Alpha Lab. This had become their getaway, a place to share a quick picnic, then return to work. From up here, sitting on an old, cheap Indian blanket spread on the gravel, they had a view to the west of the far valley and north of the lights of Los Alamos across the bridge. Usually they grabbed whatever was at hand on their way to the stairs. Tonight they were eating apples and peanut butter.

“But what if they really do try something?” Miranda said. “You weren’t here when Ben escaped. It put the whole city in a panic. And he nearly died.”

“Don’t worry. The lone bolt for freedom is one thing, a matter of desperation or sudden chance. A large-scale breakout is very different. It takes a long time to come together. It rarely happens.”

He told her about a group of Maoists who had plotted to escape from Badrighot, his Kathmandu jail. “They plotted,” he said. “And plotted and plotted. It went on for months. The conspirators came up with an elaborate plan. But the plan was useless without faith. You have to believe freedom is possible in the first place. In the case of the Maoists, they never broke the mental chains. They never did go for the wall. And the clones won’t either.”

“But they might. You want them to.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“What are you so happy about?” she said to him. “Even if they made it out, the virus would do them in.”

“You said their immune systems have an edge over ours,” Nathan Lee reminded her. “They’d have three years.”

“They’d be doomed. Three years, that’s all.” She dismissed it.

“Three years,” Nathan Lee reiterated. “That’s a lot of world.”

She frowned. “Turning them loose into the plague,” she said, “that would be the same as injecting them with virus. They’re safe here.”

“I’m not talking about turning them loose.”

“You’re thinking it, though. I can tell. But it would be a death sentence for them.”

“For them,” he retorted, “it would be a whole lifetime.”

She blinked patiently, as if he were dashing around throwing open the shutters, letting in unnecessary light. “Three years,” she said. “Then they’d die. None of them would survive. We know that for a fact. Their clonal twins were exposed to the virus in South Sector labs two and three years ago. At first we had high hopes, because they seemed immune. But then it turned out they’re only protected against whatever benign strain was running along the edges of year zero. And what’s out there now isn’t benign. They’re safe here.”

“For now,” he said.

“Once we find the cure,” she said, “they’ll have a real lifetime ahead of them. Thirty years, forty, fifty.”

Nathan Lee smeared peanut butter on his slice of apple. He took a bite. She utterly believed in the cure.
Once, not if.
“Put yourself in their place,” he said. “Faced with what they face right now, you’d take three years in a heartbeat. So would I.”

She gave him a strange look. “If I offered you the certainty of three years versus the possibility of thirty, you’d take the three?”

“Hypothetically speaking?” he said.

“Whatever.”

He felt bold, a little swept away. “Think what we could see out there, Miranda.”

“We?” she said.

She had heard it. He let the word hang there. She could it take it how she wanted. It was an invitation, or as much of one as he dared with her…or with himself.

He was ever mindful of Grace, ever. It wearied him, and his weariness felt like the worst betrayal. His quest had become a curse. His love had become a disease, or worse an abstraction. He loved his daughter because she had been his to love. Now he could not move ahead with or without her. Sometimes he could barely breathe. To speak of freedom like this felt perilous. He was so afraid his heart might change, and then who would he be? But how could he not dream?

When he didn’t commit himself any deeper, she said, “Is that what you’d do then? Run away?”

“That’s not what I’d call it.” He suddenly said, “Have you ever seen Paris?”

“Paris?”

He rushed on. “It would be all ours. Or Barcelona, or Vienna. The Alps in summer. Or Syria, I know the ruins. And Petra, it’s incredible. The light at noon. The cliffs are red.”

“Are you trying to seduce me?” She sounded stern. Analytical.

He quickly backpedaled. “You said we were talking hypothetically.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“That was you.” She was earnest, not playful. He’d blundered.

“I’m teaching myself to fly,” he stated, scrapping the plural. “I got books from the library. There’s software that walks you through it. Small fixed-wing aircraft. That’s the way to go, hopping from one airfield to another.”

In his mind’s eye, he had imagined setting off through the grand remains, winging deep between the canyons of New York City, setting off across the Atlantic, looting, handling fantastic treasures, exploring. “Paris would look as ancient as Angkor Wat,” he said. “The Louvre would be mossy. The bodies would be bone. You could camp on the beaches of Greek islands.” She frowned. He corrected himself. “One,” he said, “could sleep on top of the pyramids. I could go wherever I wanted.”

He knew something about traveling through the land of the dead. With care, he might make it all the way around the planet. The world would devour him, but not before he devoured it.

“You’re leaving?” she said.

“Call it a dream,” he said. To love someone who was living, for a change, or at least love someone within his reach. He raced over his guilt, trying to get ahead of it. It was a matter of momentum. If he paused to think of what he was thinking, he would stall.

“But you can’t,” she said.

His heart lifted. Was she reaching for him? “I’d never be missed,” he tried.

“What about the city?”

Her disbelief backed him off. He had never heard her say it like that, as if she held the life of this place in the palms of her hands.

“Los Alamos?”

“Yes,” she insisted. “We need everyone here. It’s all here.”

“All what?”

“Everything.” She scooped at the air. “Salvation.”

She was dead serious. “I thought you were going to say, you know, the last of civilization,” he teased.

“That, too,” she added without a pause. “When all the other cities are dead, we’ll be the last city.”

“I guess that’s something to carve on the tombstone,” he said. He wanted one final grand expedition through the ruins. And she wanted to nurse civilization right up to its last gasp. It made him feel lonely, for her as well as him.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “The survivors will come.”

“Ah, them,” he said. The missing links.

“The satellite teams have tracked over seven hundred survivor incidents now. Campfires, mostly, but car headlights, too, and the heat signatures of engines. They’re out there, circling around, keeping alive.”
Inheriting the earth,
thought Nathan Lee.
Doing what I want to do.