Year Zero (46 page)

It was his last word.

From behind, as if it had an enchanted life of its own, Nathan Lee’s knife appeared at Ochs’s neck. The blade moved without pause, one stroke, across and back. Ochs squinted. His scowl was full of pain, but full of questions, too. He seemed to be inviting Nathan Lee to tell him what was wrong.

Then the prophet’s throat yawed open. The hot breath escaped from his windpipe in a puff of steam. Bright blood flew across the white ground and sprayed Nathan Lee. Ochs clutched at his neck, eyes bulging. It was like watching a man strangle himself.

He didn’t topple and crash to earth. In the end, the great oak of a man simply eased down into a tangle of limbs. His bones seemed to melt. His legs folded. He sank to sitting. His spine bent and he drooped over his lap, shrinking smaller. His head met the dirt. After that he didn’t move anymore.

Nathan Lee raised his eyes. The tall soldier stood above Ochs’s body with the knife in one hand. Nathan Lee knew better than to run. He stood rooted in place as the crusaders hemmed him in.

“W
HAT ARE THEY DOING
to him?” Miranda was holding onto the very edge of the TV monitor. She was still in shock. While she lay sleeping, her lover had crossed the river and vanished. And reappeared.

Balanced on some niche in the midst of the camp, Izzy’s camera had never stopped transmitting. The mob had no idea it was there. In the foreground, bodies and faces milled back and forth, blocking and unblocking the zoom. Between their traffic, you could see the cross in the distance.

With the Captain at her side, Miranda watched Nathan Lee emerge from the crowd and jump on Ochs like a tiger and face off his small legion of warriors. From this distance, the scene was antlike. The knife—too small to see, but easy to deduce—had kept Ochs frozen and Nathan Lee temporarily safe.

Her heart felt like a stone. Her love had not been enough. In the end, Nathan Lee had succumbed to the past. He had been unable to stay away from the camp. His unfolding revenge looked so slight on the screen.

But then he stepped away and Ochs climbed to his feet and the crowd obstructed her view again. “Now what?” she said.

The Captain peered at the screen. “There,” he said. “Above their heads. See?”

She looked.

Izzy’s cross was tipping.

M
IDNIGHT

S
he watched Izzy fade to black on the lime-green satellite feed. No one could know for sure if it was really him and Nathan Lee down there. Through the veils of storm and night, all they could get on the high resolution views were thermal signatures. But Miranda knew. It would be like Nathan Lee to stay and put his back against the wind and hold his friend.

A dozen different images from this and other satellites flickered on screens around the busy room. The medium resolution pictures used a scale of one inch per mile, and they showed pools of massed human body heat that looked motionless. But by compiling images from the past twelve hours and running them at high speed, the ASTER experts had been able to display the beginnings of a wholesale retreat. Large, shapeless configurations—hundreds of thousands of people—were moving away from the epicenter. The herd pattern had been most active before sunset. Since then, darkness, plunging temperatures, and the deepening snow had bogged them.

Most hadn’t made it more than a half mile before halting for the night. But the evidence was clear. The pilgrims were leaving, or trying to. The siege had broken. They had given up on the city. The precise explanation eluded Los Alamos, but it coincided with Nathan Lee’s appearance in the valley. Maybe he had persuaded Ochs to send the pilgrims home. Or he’d warned them of dire consequences, or offered himself as the city’s ransom, or pointed them in a new direction. Something had gone on in that camp.

Throughout Los Alamos, people were celebrating as if a great war had ended. There had been an interfaith service at the Oppenheimer Center earlier in the evening, televised for those who could not attend in person. Miranda had caught parts of it. Interspliced with satellite images of the pilgrims’ retreat, the city’s priests, ministers, mullahs, rabbis, and a Buddhist monk had given thanks for their deliverance. They said prayers for the poor people now stranded in the blizzard. It was easy to think more mercifully, now that their enemy was dying at their feet.

Oddly the generals were not pleased. The city had been saved, but they tersely discarded the evidence. “It’s worse than ever now,” one told Miranda. “The fool nearly ruined everything.”

His fool was Nathan Lee. Miranda flared at him. “What more do you want?” she demanded. “We’re spared. He stole your thunder, is that it?”

“We have our orders,” the general told her.

“Whose orders?” Immediately she guessed. Her father’s, the sovereign of the deep. They believed in him and his invincible fortress made of salt. “What grand strategy of yours did Nathan Lee destroy? They’re leaving.”

“Precisely,” the general complained.

It was the closest to information she’d gotten from them. But in what way did the pilgrims’ departure unravel the generals’ strategy? She tried the contra position. How could the pilgrims’ coming advance their strategy? Miranda gave up guessing. Plainly something larger had been in motion, and Nathan Lee had derailed it. Or nearly so. The general was vexed, not defeated. The day’s events—Nathan Lee’s attack, the lowering of Izzy’s cross, the mass withdrawal—were an inconvenience. She saw that the generals were fast adapting to the situation. Their plan was still alive.

“You want a war,” she realized.

“We want maximum security.”

“Now we have it,” she said. “By this time tomorrow night, the pilgrims will be gone. You can put your swords away.”

“It’s a feint,” said the general. “They’re going back into the forests. Into their tunnels. Taking up positions.”

“What forests? What tunnels?” she demanded. It struck her. Their touchstone was Vietnam. Afghanistan. Or Gaul. The barbarians were wild things.

“We had them gathered in place, the last of them,” said the general. Now we won’t know where they are. They’re getting away.”

“Let them go,” Miranda told them. “Now we can stay.”

The generals departed, but their staff officers remained, circling the room, leaning over monitors, writing down coordinates, making notes. Every now and then one would leave the room to make a call. Their doomsday expressions were stark amidst the overall jubilation. Except for them, it was like an office party in here, the happy faces, the little pine tree with paper decorations, the strings of electric red chili lights on the wall.

Miranda kept to one corner. She didn’t want to sour their joy. The retreat was exactly what they’d been hoping for. They could stay in the open now. They could inhabit the sunlight, carry on their research, embrace the survivors, find the cure. Their high fives and hallelujahs confirmed her vision. They belonged in the city, not with her father.

She wanted to share in their gladness, but they knew she was in mourning. Their smiles faded when they looked at her. She saw their deep sighs. If not for monitor number eight, she would have gone home to grieve in private. It was too soon to grieve, in a sense. He was still alive down there. But he had killed himself. It was all on monitor number eight, a few seconds past real time, however long it took to transmit from the valley to space and back down to this room.

His luminous, hollow-eyed head turned to one side, then bent over Izzy again. She touched the screen. If only she’d known what he was thinking. She would have wrapped her arms around him, paralyzed him with her love, ordered his arrest. But in saving him, she would have doomed the city. He had given her what she wanted.

Los Alamos was aware of his sacrifice. Whatever he had done down there, he had done for them. Whether that was true or not, they believed it was so. They had chosen Nathan Lee to mark the epicenter. It was a sort of cartographic honor. All their bull’s-eye overlays centered on him. They measured their new hope outwards from where he sat.

She placed her chair sideways to the monitor so that her back was to the room. She sat next to him, inches from the screen. They’d tightened down on him to the maximum resolution, but he still looked so tiny. His skull was a matter of pixels. Sitting there, he fit under her fingertip. The image pulsed.

He had not self-infected with the Sera-III. Miranda had checked the freezer, and all the samples were accounted for. She understood. By the end of forty-eight hours, Izzy would have been dead. Ochs might have invaded. The generals might have made their move. By going immediately, Nathan Lee had preempted the alternate realities, or at least some of them.

Izzy had died. She wasn’t sure Nathan Lee even knew. For several hours she’d been watching darkness creep through Izzy’s limbs and into his core. Now he was little more than a shadow on Nathan Lee’s lap.

Beside her, a computer’s screen saver showed clouds whisking past the Matterhorn. The scene switched: the Grand Canyon at dawn. A Hawaiian waterfall. Fields of red poppies. Mount Everest at sunset. It was a box full of dreams. At last she figured out the screen theme. There were no people in the pretty places. The computer was showing her the Garden before man. She reached over and turned it off.

They had supplies to last a decade. With care, there seemed no reason they could not last forever. If the plague approached again, they could always self-infect. Three years, Nathan Lee had argued with her. A whole lifetime.

She returned to the monitor, to her spectral lover.
How long are you going to sit there?
His hands were losing light. She could see it. He was freezing. She resented that. He knew how to take care of himself. If he could make it across Tibet in the dead of winter, this should be a snap. But he just sat there.

Finally she could not bear to simply watch. She got to her feet. Her jaw was set. Her decision was made.

Nathan Lee would be hot with the virus now, but she could wear a biohazard suit. The roads were piling up with snow, but she could take one of the big Army trucks with chains. For that matter, she could walk. It was only twelve miles. The snow couldn’t be that deep.

The Captain intercepted her at the door. She hadn’t even been aware he was here. “Forget it,” he said. “One sacrifice is enough.”

“I’m bringing him back,” she told him. “He can live out what’s left in a warm bed in South Sector.”

“That’s not what he wants.”

“Oh, he told you?”

“I have eyes.”

“Well I’m not giving up on him.”

“We need you here, Miranda,” he said.

“Then send a team of men for him.”

“Don’t spoil it,” said the Captain.

She felt skinned, she was so raw. “Spoil it?” she shouted. People looked. She lowered her voice. “He’s throwing himself away.”

“You know better.” He crooked one arm around her shoulders.

She thought he was going to offer a sympathy hug. “Save your pity,” she said.

But with a motion, he swept her to face the wall like a naughty child. He put his head next to hers. “The man’s doing his job,” he whispered in her ear. He was stern. “Do yours.”

The reprimand took her breath. He wasn’t finished. He laid one hand on her stomach. On her womb.

She flushed. He’d learned her secret. “He told you before he went,” she whispered.

“No,” said the Captain. “Like I said, I have eyes. My wife, she knew you were pregnant a long time ago. I wasn’t so sure. But I am now.”

She fought with her joy, fought with her sorrow, which was it?

“You need to be thinking,” the Captain said. “What will you tell the city in the morning? They’ll want to hear where things go from here.”

That hadn’t occurred to her. She would have to go public with something. Their victory needed enunciation. “What am I supposed to say?” she murmured.

“Give them a story. Tell them about the future. Make it up. A new land. Wherever it is you see us going.”

He let go of her shoulder, and it felt like she was tumbling through empty space. She put her hands against the wall to steady herself. She laid her forehead against the hardness and breathed out. Tears began burning down her cheeks, her first tears. She was shaking. Now was the time for the Captain to give her his shoulder. But he didn’t. No pity. He just stood beside her, faced out to the room, and guarded her tears.

Then, for some reason, the sirens began.

Swiping at her tears, Miranda glanced around. All through the room, heads were lifting from monitors. People stood hesitantly, half certain the wailing would shut off. But it went on.

“What’s happening?” Miranda asked. “Are we under attack?”

She looked for the generals’ staffers. Maybe they could explain. But they had left.

Men and women had begun checking each other’s screens, confused. “It’s got to be a false alarm,” someone insisted. “There’s no movement in the valley.” Even so, people began drifting to the doorway, reluctant to leave their stations, and yet tugged by the sirens. They didn’t know what to trust.

Out in the hallway, men and women were streaming for the exits, shrugging on jackets, grumbling about the bother. Miranda pushed through them, making for the stairway to the roof. The Captain was at her heels. She climbed the stairs two at a time.

The rooftop was bright with floodlights. The snow sparkled like jewels. It was piled to her knees, deeper than she’d thought. The air swirled with heavy white flakes. On the edge of the dark forest, tall phantom pines came and went in the gusts.

Miranda went to the edge of the building and looked across at the glittering city. It was beautiful, all decorated with holiday lights. Big snow plows with flashing blue lights were blading clean the roads. Columns of soldiers were filing through the streets. The air raid sirens went on howling at them, waking the city, waking the dead.

The generals, she thought. They weren’t finished yet.

N
ATHAN
L
EE
lifted his head. He heard the song. He opened his eyes.

The world was pitch black. He had been nearing the bottom. Hypothermia was its own realm. Now he floated back to consciousness.

Who could be singing? It was so beautiful.

He took a long minute to remember where he was. He didn’t see the snow. He didn’t feel the weight across his legs. His arms were stone. He felt rooted to the earth. Ancient as a relic.

He thought,
I’m blind.
Then he lifted his head a little more, and there was the faintest glow on the far horizon.
Dawn,
he smiled. Night was passing.

The singing had no words. He listened more intently. It came to him.
The throats of angels.

Then there was light.