Year Zero (27 page)

A
UGUST 10

A
s the chieftans arrived at the Council chamber, they helped themselves to Krispy Kremes and Starbucks blends, the last of the franchises kept alive by soldiers’ wives. Miranda took her seat at the long, oval table with the other lab directors, and they waited for Cavendish, who had summoned them. They had no idea what the urgency was. His office had simply given them twenty minutes to assemble.

Maps and charts were hastily being pinned to the walls. A large video screen glowed blue and empty on one wall. Miranda looked through the window at the Pajarito massif looming to the west, the remains of a vast, ancient volcano upon which other, smaller volcanoes had later boiled up and gone dead. Its geology fit them like a myth, a giant mountain underlying all their smaller mountains, the Lab hiving off smaller labs, the immense energy of their history and science growing cold as stone.

She glanced around the table, and the faces were weary. The hope had leached from their eyes. They didn’t kibbitz or fire jokes or buttonhole one another. They sat and quietly waited like people on a long march resting. The former head of Virus Diseases in WHO’s Geneva headquarters was eating doughnuts beside a wispy Nigerian from England’s Porton Down, once the leading viral diagnostic lab in Europe. The ex-director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp sat across from the ex-director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. A dead ringer for Omar Sharif, from the Aga Khan University in Karachi, was trying to keep his eyes off the bosomy blonde from Johannesburg’s Institute of Medical Research. On the streets you heard French and Hindi and Russian and Chinese, but the lingua franca was American, not English, but American with its slang and fighter-pilot shorthand.

Besides the virus hunters and medical ninja, there was a whole zoo of cloning and bioengineering expertise here: a mouse man, a cow man, a sheep lady, even a snow lion specialist who had spent years in the field shooting the cats with sedative darts and collecting their eggs and sperm to be frozen for the day snow lions no longer existed. Now the endangered species was man.

The door opened. Cavendish appeared, wheeled in by his tall, solemn clone. Cavendish’s gnomelike face seemed more pinched and weary than ever. His illnesses were whittling him down to a twig. Miranda wanted to feel sorry for him, but she knew Cavendish didn’t pity himself. In turn, he didn’t pity anyone else.

A happy, rumpled, dazed-looking man trailed behind. It took Miranda a minute to place him. He was with atmospheric sciences. What was he doing here? The department had become something of an antique. Who needed a five-day forecast anymore, much less the temperature in Timbuktu? Global warming? No one cared.

Cavendish started in on them with his usual bile. “You’re going in circles,” he said. “I see it between the lines in your lab reports. The paths of investigation have bent back upon themselves. It’s not good enough.”

“And a very good morning to you,” someone muttered under his breath.

“But we have made a discovery,” Cavendish continued. “Maybe it means something, maybe not.” He gestured with a finger.

The weather man stepped forward. Behind him, the video screen came alive with satellite images of the earth. Clouds hung like cotton wisps. The planet looked serene. “Bob Maples, meteorology,” he said. He couldn’t quit grinning. “I head the Red Surveillance team.”

Maples clicked a remote control. The earth images switched color. The majestic blue ocean turned mottled with thermal pools. The continental masses loomed dark except for North America, which held pools and veins of red seepage.

“Just to summarize,” Maples said, “Red Surveillance tracks human catabolism on a mass scale.” He had a funeral director’s delicacy. We’re basically a sort of high-tech morgue. We use ASTER technology, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer instruments built into various satellite platforms to track groupings of gases associated with decomposition. Red is the pseudo-color we keyed on our spectrographs for plumes of ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and so forth.”

Papers rustled. Throats cleared. They knew all of this. Peering through their satellite lenses, the ASTER specialists had become cartographers of the extinction event, plotting what was literally the last gasp of dead and dying cities. Over the past two years, they had watched the bright red flowers of gas bloom and then fade. Miranda’s plague map was nothing more than a compilation of all the plumes, past and present.

Maples heard their impatience and hurried through a series of beautiful earth shots, cutting to the chase. “For months there have been no measurable death plumes outside of North America,” he said. “All the other continents went dark last March. Overseas, the human die-off is complete. We pretty much quit watching. I mean there was nothing more to look for.” The grin returned. “Then around noon today, purely by accident, one of my people switched the search key. He programmed for heat, anything double the ambient temperature. At the time he was hitchhiking on the European Union weather satellite. Like a number of other unattended satellites, it’s drifted out of orbit, more space junk getting ready to fall from the sky. But the optics are all there, and it happened to be pointing in the right place at the right time. And this is what he found.”

The rapid montage of earth shots changed color. The red flipped to lime green and black. The streaming images slowed to a near halt. Miranda could just make out the dark spur of the Indian subcontinent. Along the bottom margin the videotape identified itself: EUMETSAT, 08/10, 12:04:52 PM MST.” The latitude and longitude were listed. The tape advanced. The clock counter turned to 12:05:09.

“There,” said Maples. “Did you see it?”

“See what?” someone said.

Maples grinned and bobbed his head. He was delighted. “Watch again, here.” He pointed at the arc of the Bay of Bengal. “Calcutta.”

The tape replayed. This time they saw it. A pinprick of light, scarcely a twinkle. Then it was gone.

“Yes?” a woman said.

“Exactly,” said Maples. “At first we wrote it off as a gremlin, a glitch in the hardware. Then we took a second look.”

This time the image was magnified. The tape returned to 12:04:52. Calcutta winked at them. It was like a single faint star in a universe of darkness.

“Fire,” said Maples.

No one moved at the table.

The implications were staggering. They changed everything. No one dared to believe it.

“Impossible,” the WHO head challenged him.

“I know, I know,” Maples bobbed, all teeth, thrilled to be of help at last.

“Again,” someone demanded.

Maples replayed it. He jacked the zoom. There was no mistaking it. A fire had been burning in Calcutta at five minutes after midnight last night.

“A ruptured gas main, nothing more,” a woman remarked.

“That’s what we thought,” said Maples. “It couldn’t be human. Maybe it was a house fire sparked by lightning. Or an explosion caused by an earthquake. There’s all kinds of combustibles out there. A thousand other things it could be besides manmade.” Maples was waving his hands. “So we zoomed the lens. We programmed for 98.6 degrees. Computer enhanced it. And this is what we got.”

The pseudo-green scale magnified. The focus sharpened. The nocturnal image rose up between urban ruins. “Human body heat.”

There was the fire glittering brightly. And then a ghostly figure—the heat signature of a biped—approached the fire. Man, woman or child, it reached a stick into the fire, then withdrew and sat down.

“But there’s no one left out there. The virus passed through there a year ago.” The voice was raspy. Miranda didn’t look to see who was speaking. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen.

“Eleven months ago, to be exact,” said Maples. He was ready for them. He hit another button. “September, last year,” he said. The image changed to his Red Surveillance spectrograph. The Indian subcontinent was acid with red plumes. It looked like nuclear weapons going off. The image fast-forwarded. The red plumes stormed north as villages and cities putrefied. The ammonia clouds blossomed brightest above the cities. The great rivers turned arterial red. At last the red tempest faded, then disappeared. The subcontinent returned to peace. “January, this year,” said Maples.

For a fleeting moment, Miranda tried to remember when Nathan Lee had fled. He must have been running just ahead of that viral onslaught. It was a miracle anyone could have survived. Yet he had. And so, apparently, had someone else, though differently. Could this be a Category One Survivor?

Maples returned to the ghostly green figure sitting in front of the fire.

“Do you know what this means?” someone whispered.

“It would be wrong to jump to conclusions,” another warned.

“A survivor!” murmured Miranda’s neighbor. “Category One.”

Miranda kept staring at the figure on the screen. It could have been a caveman crouching close to his little tongue of flame, all alone in the night.

“A freak occurrence,” a voice scoffed. “A fluke.”

“Exactly what we’re looking for,” someone retorted.

“Not necessarily,” Cavendish cautioned. “We don’t know what we’re looking at here. There are three reasons a person might survive a parasite this lethal: luck, natural resistance, or immunity. We saw that with AIDS and Ebola and Marburg.”

“We also saw it with polio, the Black Death, and every other pandemic in human history,” said Miranda. “But the point here is that we’ve never seen it with Corfu. An immunity event!”

Her thoughts ricocheted. This changed everything, potentially. Ever since Corfu had broken loose and run rampant, they had been searching for survivors. That was the whole excuse for cloning the Year Zero specimens: they had needed to reach back in time to find any survivors of the virus, even of the more benign, ancient strain. But here, in the heart of Calcutta, squatted a modern survivor.

“There’s more,” interrupted Maples. “Once we identified the Calcutta event, we started a computer search for more campfires, not just in India, but on all the continents and major islands, and not just for last night but for all the nights for six months past. There are millions of images to investigate, and the search will go on for weeks or months. But look at what we’ve found in a few short hours!”

The images began dancing around the world. The date codes on the margins changed back and forth. It was September in Spain, June in Borneo, February in Moscow. Now that they knew what to look for, the tableful of scientists spotted the pinpoints of light with increasing ease. They got up from the table and gathered in front of the video screen, pressing together, barking at each new discovery.

In the space of five minutes, with Maples guiding them, they found evidence of at least nineteen other survival “events,” as the Red Surveillance team had already christened the campfires. Maples was like a puppy. “I’ve assigned some of my ASTER crew to examine old tapes for fires first, body heat second. The fires are most pronounced. They’re tagging each of these events and tracking backwards and forwards in time. We now know that the Calcutta event has been occurring in the same place for the past three weeks. Fires have also been located in Rome, Perth, Phnom Penh, Kinshasa, and Vladivostok. From one night to another, some have moved from place to place. That suggests migration. Opportunistic. Or driven by fear. Some stay in place. All are located in cities. That probably means the survivors are subsisting on whatever they can loot from the ruins. We can only guess. They must be like Robinson Crusoe, most of them, alone or in pairs or tiny groups, slowly going primitive.”

The Santiago event had five human-shaped heat signatures. The survivors were finding each other. In faraway lands, they were banding together in tribes. There was life after the plague. Now if only the secret of their survival could be unraveled while there was still a civilized world left.

“We must not get excited,” cautioned the Pakistani. “Dr. Cavendish is correct. What are we looking at here? Which kind of survivors are these people?” He held up three fingers. “Are they Category Three? Were they just lucky, hiding in caves or submarines while the plague passed overhead? Did the virus simply miss them? In which case, they are of no use to us. The virus will find them. Once they are exposed, they, too, will die.”

He lowered one finger. “Or are they Category Two, impervious to the virus? Are their bodies somehow inherently resistant? Recall the prostitute study in Tanzania. Year after year of unprotected sex, sometimes with dozens of infected men in a single night, and yet a group of sixty women never developed AIDS. Scientists shadowed them for well over a decade. They came up with every kind of theory. But no one ever learned the secret of their resistance. In which case, these people may be of no use at all in our duel with Corfu.”

He held up a single finger. “Or did the virus actually enter these people? Were they exposed, and did they develop antibodies? Are they Category One? Have their immune systems begun to co-evolve with the virus? In which case,” he wagged his head, “maybe they can save us. Maybe not.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” someone said.

“Go find them?” a voice scoffed. Miranda faced around. It was the head of the Immortality lab. She was still getting used to the division title, though it fit perfectly. Most viruses destroyed their host cells once they were finished using it as a virus factory. Corfu was different. It instructed host cells to keep dividing without ever dying, hence “immortality.” One more mystery, one more lab. “They’re on the far side of the planet,” the lab chief went on. “We might as well be looking at pictures sent back from Mars. We can’t get across our own country, much less around the world.”