Year Zero (21 page)

“Grace,” he said out loud. She had bangs, he could see that much. It had been a day at the playground. She was on a swing set, coming down a slide, dangling from the monkey bars. He smiled.

He went through the strips frame by frame. If he could make out the playground, he thought there was a chance of locating Lydia’s new neighborhood. One frame had part of a building in the background. It had a fairytale turret with a crenellated battlement running off the edge. Disneyland, he thought. But on closer study, it was the Castle at the Smithsonian. That was one clue.

A second clue waited at the bottom of the box, a wedding invitation. Mrs. Swift had become Lydia Ochs-Houghton.
The parents of Baxter Montgomery Houghton wish to announce.
…He looked at the date twice, awed by her ability—to the very end—to blind him. Even as he was crawling down from Makalu La, still missing, she was saying I do. He put the days together. June 10: Ochs had probably made it home in time for the champagne. They’d tricked him, brother and sister. He felt small. Everything had been kept from him. While he was fighting for visitation rights, she had been courting.

“You wrote those letters,” the woman stated. “They were already opened. I read them.”

He cleared his throat. He looked at the envelopes, and each had been neatly slit with a letter opener along the side, not the top. That was Lydia’s habit.

“I wonder…” He balked at his own foolishness. “Do you think my daughter ever heard a word of what I wrote?”

“Did her mother still love you?”

“No,” said Nathan Lee.

“Then I don’t think so.” The woman came within an inch of touching his arm. “She would have been afraid of your power.”

It was the first kindness Nathan Lee had experienced in a very long time. He didn’t know how to respond, and so he shied from it. “My five minutes are up,” he said. “I have no way to repay this.”

“Be a good man,” the woman said to him. That was all.

T
HE LEADS WERE THIN
, but Lydia’s trail was not cold. True, there was no hint of where she had taken Grace. The wedding invitation said nothing about her new husband’s origins. After much searching, Nathan Lee found an unburned copy of the District of Columbia phone directory from two years ago, and the numerous Houghtons did not include anyone named Baxter, nor any Ochs named Lydia. But there was still the Smithsonian. Ochs had been there, he was sure of it, on business. If the man had started plundering for the museum, there was bound to be some record of him.

Reaching the Smithsonian was no easy task. The center of government—fifty square blocks, including the Mall—had been sealed off from the general populace, stored away until the plague passed and the government could return. At the Marine checkpoints along Independence Avenue, Nathan Lee played the absentminded professor, insisting the museum had summoned him to help assemble the bones of a million-year-old apeman. It took five hours, and two blood tests, to penetrate their defenses. At the last checkpoint, an officer assigned two Marines to escort him to his destination.

The sky sullied to gray. The air grew heavy. It was going to rain.

Government buildings stood barren, their ground floor windows boarded over as for a hurricane, the upper windows glassy and eyeless. They skirted what was left of the FBI building. An explosion had gnawed a gaping hole in the edifice.

They came to the Mall, a vast green field gone to seed. Their legs whip-whipped through the uncut grass. The stars-and-stripes fluttered at half mast on the poles surrounding the Washington Monument. Nathan Lee looked around at all the stillness. He was starting to understand. The Marines had been assigned to watch over statues and pigeons, little more. The jewel of the American empire lay hollow.

A fine drizzle began. The two Marines put on ponchos. Nathan Lee seated his
Yosemite: The West Is Best
cap with neck flaps tighter on his head. He led them to the Natural History Museum, which housed the anthropology collection and offices, but it was boarded shut. The workmen had even sealed the edges with epoxy. It would take power tools to cut one’s way inside.

“I thought you said this was the place,” said one of the Marines.

“They told me the Smithsonian,” Nathan Lee blustered. “It has twelve different museums. I presumed….”

“Come on, man, it’s raining.”

Across the meadow, the Castle loomed, its red sandstone towers and spires swathed in ivy. This was the original building, its odd, Norman architecture inspired by Sir Walter Scott novels. A wet American flag hung atop the central tower. “There,” he said, “that must be the one.”

As they crossed to the Castle, he tried to entertain the souring Marines. “Abraham Lincoln once surveyed the city’s defenses from that tower,” he said. They weren’t in the mood. He threw out more trivia, wetter by the step.

Things did not look promising. From the steps to the high arch, the front doors were barricaded with masonry blocks. The windows were dark blanks, boarded over from the inside. The mighty fortress of collections and knowledge had become a haunted house.

They circled the building completely. Little markers at the base of the walls identified each different climbing vine. Back at the front entrance, they came to halt. The sunlight was fading fast. The rain cut harder, rattling against their ponchos. Nathan Lee was drenched, not a convincing picture.

“You don’t really belong here, do you?” one of the Marines said. “Let’s see your paperwork. Orders. A letter of authorization.”

Nathan Lee’s bluff was crumbling. Somewhere inside these buildings were clues about where Ochs had gone, he was certain of it. “I told you. It was verbal. They sent a messenger.”

“They? I don’t see anyone, sir. Where’s your blood book?”

With growing alarm, Nathan Lee handed it over, and the soldier didn’t look at it. They were confiscating his blood book! He thought of running, but even if they didn’t shoot him, he would be trapped without his passport.

At that moment, a metal door creaked open on the fire escape two stories overhead. An old man appeared on the small grated deck. Calmly smoking a pipe in the rain, scanning the far distances, he didn’t notice them at first. He stood there, pale and delicate, like an ancient submariner getting a breath of fresh air.

Unbelievably, Nathan Lee thought he recognized the ghost. “Spencer?” he said. “Spencer Baird?” He was—or had been—a paleontologist. He had to be ninety.

The old man looked down at them. “Who goes there?”

“Do you know this man, sir?” a Marine called up to him.

“Spencer, it’s me,” said Nathan Lee. “I came when you sent word.” He pulled off his cap and pawed flat his short, chopped, wet beard, trying to make his face younger. He didn’t dare identify himself by his real name, because the Marines knew him as someone else. It was not a small matter. No one had better reason to hide their true identity than a plague carrier.

The old man leaned over the wet railing. “Word? What’s the word?”

“Fred Whipple,” Nathan Lee tried. He dug for other names, praying one of them might still be around. “Joe Henry. Charlie Abbot. They said ASAP.” He added, “The bones.”

“Ah,” said Baird, “the bones.”

“I’m here.”

“Thank god. We’ve been waiting for you.” Baird looked old as Noah up there with his white beard in the clattering rain. “But who are you?”

There was no way around it. “Swift,” said Nathan Lee.

One of the Marines said, “Wait a minute.” He pulled Nathan Lee’s blood book from under his poncho for a second look.

“Is that you, Nathan Lee?” Baird leaned out further. “They said you were a goner. Swallowed by the mountains.”

“What’s your name, sir?” the Marine said.

Hurry,
thought Nathan Lee.
Reach down. Raise me up.

“Get in here before you catch your death, man,” Baird said. “Don’t you see it’s raining?”

Nathan Lee reached for the fire escape ladder. The Marine grabbed his arm. “Not so fast,” he said.

“They know me.” Nathan Lee smiled. He tried to smile. His teeth chattered.

“Let him go,” said the second Marine. He took the blood book and slapped Nathan Lee’s chest with it. “The man’s home. At least somebody belongs somewhere.”

Nathan Lee pulled himself up the fire escape and climbed the metal stairs. Baird welcomed him with tobacco breath and mighty slaps on the back. Inside the building was pitch black. Baird handed Nathan Lee his two-foot Maglite, heavy as an axe, and pulled the steel door shut against the storm. “They said you were dead,” he kept repeating. “Wait till the others see.”

Nathan Lee followed him through the dark bowels of the institute. “I’m looking for a man named David Ochs,” he said. “A professor.”

“Ox?”

“An archaeologist. A big man. A professor.”

“Never heard of him,” said Baird.

“What about Dean White?” Nathan Lee asked hopefully. White was the curator who had commissioned the Himalayan hunt two years ago.

“White,” barked Baird. “He got his nuts handed to him after your peccadillo. Is it true you killed a man? And ate him?”

“Are there others from the anthro department here? They’d know about Ochs.”

“Gone. All gone,” said Baird. “But it’s in the paperwork, I’m sure.”

“Is the paperwork here, in this building?”

“There is a chance.” Baird gestured at thousands of cardboard boxes stacked in the hallways. There was barely room to walk between them. “Thought you were dead.”

Voices trickled from further ahead. They descended a staircase. In the distance, he saw a dozen old people eating dinner by candlelight in the dark shadows of a vestibule.

They looked spectral surrounding the silver candelabra. The men had ties and jackets. Two wore tuxes, one a smoking jacket with ascot. The women looked ready for the opera, with
pashminas
draped over their shoulders to ward off the chill. They were eating from antique blue plates, with heavy silverware and crystal wine glasses. Nathan Lee could smell each part of their meal…the veal and lobster, the butter sauce and basil, the red wine from old bottles. Not one of them was under eighty.

“Look what the wind blew in,” Baird announced to the group. With a slow flourish, he turned to display his discovery.

But the hallway was empty.

L
OS
A
LAMOS

C
avendish’s clone passed among them like a ghost. He traveled everywhere, threading through their security systems, appearing inside their labs, hacking into their computers. He crawled insidetheir secrets. He wormed inside their minds. At first, Adam didn’t hate them. He simply wanted to know what made him different.

In the beginning, his flesh had been sport enough. No longer stapled to Cavendish’s wheelchair, but still filled with Cavendish’s memory, it was like passing from himself. He had started out as Cavendish in mind, but he was no longer Cavendish. For a time, they had been like Siamese twins joined at the head, right down to the neural twitch and the tremor in their hands. Every memory before twenty months ago had been a memory shared with his creator.

For a while after Adam’s birth, Cavendish had done everything to keep his
doppelgänger
on a short leash, close at hand, day and night. Adam was required to dress Cavendish in the morning and wash him at night. Adam wheeled his chair. At meetings, he stood to the rear, mute, like some exotic potted plant. He cooked Cavendish breakfast and dinner. Even his name, so cliche, like a chain around his neck.

Their chess games were a source of humor for Cavendish. Neither could make a move the other didn’t know. Every game ended in stalemate. But then one day Adam made a move of his own. “Checkmate,” he whispered, and stood. He towered above the board. That was the first time he had felt his wings spread open. They seemed to fill the room. And Cavendish, ravaged by disease, cupped in his wheelchair, seemed far below.

After that, Adam had systematically severed himself, tissue and mind, from his maker. It was a dangerous procedure, because his Cavendish-consciousness knew that Cavendish was waiting for just such a breach. The one thing Cavendish feared in the world was the power of his own mind. Above all else, he did not want his secrets roaming beyond his control. Adam knew that Cavendish had planned to terminate him once he saw his cloned, living body. He was an experiment, a vanity. Cavendish merely wanted to see himself immaculate and unflawed.

It would not have been Cavendish’s first murder, Adam knew. There were others besides the old woman, Golding. Cavendish had deported dozens of his enemies into the wastelands of America, or even disappeared them into their own lethal experiments. For some reason which Adam did not fully understand, Cavendish had been merciful to his clone. He had permitted him to live. All the same, Adam was careful.

His freedom came in doses, literally. Los Alamos abounded with chemists from pharmaceutical companies. Adam obtained a sedative, organically constructed, that would not leave traces in Cavendish’s blood. Cavendish was a gourmand with a weakness for California
nouvelle
cuisine, light portions exquisitely arranged. He never suspected the sleeping potion. In that way, Adam began his rebellion. He occupied the night.

At first it was a game. He sampled his own body. He spent hours in front of the mirror. With weights and anabolic steroids, he jumpstarted his muscles. He injected synthetic testosterone to rewire his lymphatic system. Soon his quads and calves were stretching his blue jeans tight. In the dark of night, he ran for miles along Los Alamos’s forest roads. Cavendish noticed the changes, but slowly. He commented on the veins along Adam’s arms and thighs. Adam played to his narcissism. He was careful not to display his enormous strength, only his beauty. He became David to his Michelangelo. Cavendish began to touch him. He marveled at what he might have been.

Adam didn’t rush his independence. Sometimes escape is a thing best done in slow motion, in plain view. Not until the eleventh month did he have a woman. Soon he’d had many. He experienced forbidden sensations that boggled his mind.

Inevitably, Adam grew bored. It was an inherited trait, a defense mechanism, a by-product of rampant genius. Humanity annoyed him. It gratified him to see the great cities desolate, the great bridges traversed only by the occasional dog. The plague had surged in waves, backing off, giving hope, then mutating and charging into them again. Everything human was dead now except America, and that was on the brink.

He’d downloaded the best of their downfall, the scenes of 747s crashing at airports or being shot from the sky, the torpedo sinking of refugee boats and even a Princess Cruise liner trying to return from Bermuda, the final bell ring of the New York stock exchange, the last clap of the gavel suspending Congress eight months ago. A group of survivalists had strung together a colony in the upper reaches of a redwood forest in Washington, a village of rope bridges and Tarzan swings connecting their nylon ledges. Adam liked that website. The apes were returning to the trees.

He continued to take sex, but he no longer hunted it. It wasn’t a discovery process anymore, only an urge, like defecating. The Internet crashed. You could surf the satellites, but he was jaded. With time, he turned from one taboo to another. He became an incubus, poaching their thoughts, stealing their privacy. Getting inside them.

The trespassing started as a thrill ride. He broke their security codes, hacked into their memory banks, peeped on them through their own surveillance cameras: it was fun. It satisfied his growing contempt for them. Adam perfected his vanishing act. He bobbed upon their electronic consciousness, only to disappear.

This was different from their plague surfing, which he’d indulged in, too. Soon that got old, as well. Adam began to visit the technical areas in person.

Audacity, that was the ticket, that and the right biological minutiae. By every measure, except his metamorphosis, he was his father Cavendish. His fingerprints, his retinal signature, the chemicals of his exhaled breath, his blood, his speech patterns, all of it identified him as the Director. A security guard tried to report his one self to the other. But Adam, posing as Cavendish, intercepted the report and had the guard and his family deported to a hot zone. From then on, no one challenged him. The lesson was clear. It meant death not to let Cavendish be Cavendish.

For the first few weeks of exploring the grounds, he merely rubber-necked. They amazed him, these desperate people. The sheer abundance of scientific experiments could not make up for their futility. The variety of approaches amused Adam. Some verged on alchemy. In their rush to find a cure, people were trying anything and everything. He could feel his boredom returning.

Then one night he pushed the envelope. He entered the forbidding technical areas collectively called South Sector. They took up the entire southern third of Los Alamos county. Geographically, it was a separate region altogether, occupying an isolated mesa finger far from the city and other technical areas. Here, “deep behind the fence,” inside fences within fences, lay the BSL-4s.

Level Four’s were treated with a respect that bordered on dread. They were the ultimate killing field. BSL-4 workers were considered the Top Guns of virus hunting. One mistake—one pinhole rip in your suit, one Diet Coke too many, one wrong twitch—and not only you, but your entire crew of researchers and support personnel could be infected. In such an emergency, the whole building had to be sterilized. The infected crew went into quarantine, which was simply a prolonged imprisonment while the researchers turned into the plague victims they had once studied. It had happened twice here in South Sector. One of the buildings had been written off, and now lay entombed in cement, like the Chernobyl reactor. Five teams had ended up becoming test fodder for their colleagues. They ate their young here.

The first time Adam entered a BSL-4 was for the challenge. Also, he wanted to go where Cavendish, with his disabilities and suppressed immune system, had never dared to go. Perhaps here was the rite of passage that would truly separate him from his maker.

It was, thought Adam, like diving to the bottom of the ocean. The moon suits were fed with air that roared through hoses attached to the ceiling. It was so loud they had to wear ear plugs, or lose their hearing.

While he suited up in a moon suit made of bright orange, ripstop fabric, Adam asked what they were investigating. Different labs were dedicated to trying to breach the disease cycle at different stages in different organs. This lab’s focus, a woman told him, was “prenatal sanctuary.”

“The placental barrier,” she said. “While they’re still in the womb, the fetuses are protected from the virus. They’re not immune. Just sheltered.”

Adam thought that was lovely. “So they’re born in a state of innocence.”

The woman gave a shrug. “Coming through the birth canal, they get infected. Like I said, they’re not immune.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

“Who knows?” she said.

Then it was time to stop their ears with foam.

They donned their helmets and entered a short tunnel saturated with purple UV light. At the door to the work bay, the woman helped Adam snap into one of the hoses dangling from the ceiling. Immediately his suit inflated with cool air. The sound of the respirator pump thundered. When they were all connected to hoses, the lead man opened the door. Adam felt a gentle tug as the negative-pressure air lock opened before them.

He hung back at the door, surprised. He had expected glove boxes and a window looking upon rows of tissue samples in wax or in test tubes. Instead, a plague victim awaited them. She lay on an operating table in the center of the room. She was very pregnant. Adam could see the fetus through her skin. He went forward reluctantly. He was numb with horror. Suddenly this wasn’t fun.

They took their stations around the table, mute and dumb. Each knew his or her part in the procedure. They had done this many times. Adam stood to one side as they had instructed him. He had a growing idea what they were going to do. He saw the row of instruments.

They did not work swiftly. Safety required slow, sure motions. He could see their lips moving inside their helmets, as if they were counting by numbers. They didn’t bother with anesthetic. The woman’s mind was faraway. The scalpel took forever.

Adam looked away. He cursed his curiosity. He was shivering. But part of him craved to see the worst of it. He looked again. Her heart went on beating. For a few minutes more, it was stronger than their need to know. When they had their samples, they stopped it, the infant’s, too.

The gurney was removed. A spray of chemicals burst from nozzles overhead. The last remaining blood washed down a drain. Adam thought that was the end of it.

A minute later, the door opened and a second mother was brought in.

They processed eight of them that shift. Sixteen, including the infants.

Afterward, Adam ran home through the night. He hid under his bed covers, sleepless.

In the morning, he told Cavendish he felt a cold coming on. He lay in bed all day, wrestling with the enormity of what he had seen. He was not supposed to feel these emotions. Clones were shadow creatures. No one said so, but they were considered less than human. He knew this from the inside of Cavendish’s mind.

Cavendish had a container of chicken noodle soup delivered to Adam at noon.

That same night Adam was back in South Sector for more.

From then on, he haunted the BSL-4’s, steeping himself in their savagery, appalled but also titillated that human beings could do this to themselves. Every terrible thing he could imagine was carried out in the name of science.

The labs had an unending supply of plague victims, who were harvested from the cities. They arrived in every state of the disease, some not even aware they were infected. Night after night, Adam watched them being sacrificed. The test subjects were generically labelled “expendables,” a term from American medical research after World WarII. Back then the expendables had been Nazis and Russian spies. Now they were Americans…and the Year Zero men.

By far, the greatest horror to him was what they did to the Year Zero clones. These were healthy young men who were purposely infected. Virus was sprayed in their eyes, down their throats, into their ears. It was scratched into their skin or injected. Then they were dissected alive.

The clones cried out. Deep inside his moon suit, with his ears plugged, Adam couldn’t hear their words. But they were speaking. The researchers insisted the words weren’t real words. That drove Adam deeper. He began to record their language.

What made the Year Zero clones special to Adam was that he was not only one of them, but also their
causa causans,
their first and final cause. He had been created so that they could be created. He was the first of them. He was their past, but also he was their future. They did not come from his blood, but they were his progeny. His race. Their child. Through them, he was being born yet again.

The part of him that was Cavendish had damned these poor creatures to being born so that they could die. He carried the memory of authorizing their manufacture and suffering. Adam could close his eyes and see a hand that was his, and yet not his, signing the order. When he looked in the mirror, he saw one more lab animal. Except for a twist of fate, they would have opened him with their knives, long ago.

He could not free the clones, not without sacrificing himself. South Sector was sacred grounds. The cure was their religion. To free the clones would be like setting devils loose in a cathedral.

Then an idea began to form.