Year Zero (45 page)

No one knew him, but it seemed everyone recognized him. He was clean and healthy and whole, an American marvel. He startled them. His face was washed. He’d shaved. No dreadlocks, no beard, no festering sores. He had all his teeth. They parted before him. He was like a relic from their past. Out of curiosity, they began to tag along.

It started small and grew. The further Nathan Lee went, the larger his following became. He could feel them back there, hear their wonder. Plainly they were waiting for something or someone to break the awful, grinding, peasant monotony. Any excuse would do. Instead of coffee or talk radio, they had him.

Once across the bridge, Nathan Lee had planned on blending into the masses and stealing his way from there. But his passage was taking on a life of its own. The swiftness of it alarmed him. He had no more control over them than Miranda did over the virus. Lumbering up from the icy muck along the road’s shoulders and the outlying desert, they fell in behind him without reason. He wanted to stop and shout at them to go away, but this was their home, and he was the stranger. He wanted to run and hide, but that would only have made him more conspicuous. And so he forged on toward the cloverleaf looming ahead at I-84.

There was no mistaking their nationality. For one thing, they congregated more densely on and along the ribbons of blacktop. The highways seemed part of their soul. Also, their clothing declared a binding history. Little Mermaid sweatshirts mingled with NFL team jerseys, Gap jeans with Desert Storm camouflage, fast-food work shirts with FedEx and U.S. Postal Service jackets, faux furs with real. The rags were layered one on top of another. As winter felled the weak, not one thread of clothing went to waste. The dead and dying were nude.

The crowd trailed behind. Their numbers swelled. Nathan Lee felt trapped out front with no alternative except to stay in motion. He made his stride confident, never mind that he was lost in their chaos. He didn’t dare pause or show uncertainty or ask questions.

He kept looking above the multitude for a particular cross with a man hanging on it. He passed pyres so large they threw heat a hundred feet and cracked and thundered like small forest fires. He saw powerlines looping down through the smoke, then soaring from sight in the murk above. Crosses jutted here and there, but all were empty, and not one was the right shape, with a long stem and high crossbar. He’d memorized it from the video images, and counted on it for his landmark. But it was nowhere to be seen.

He would have been lost without the people. Oddly it was their herd mentality that guided him. They didn’t point the way. But as Nathan Lee advanced, the throngs ahead seemed to know where he must be going and they opened a corridor for him. All he had to do was follow their expectations.

In that way, half a mile on, just past the intersection of highways, Nathan Lee reached the center. It was in a clearing in a shallow hollow. The cross was down there, and Ochs was with it.

Nathan Lee had figured Ochs would be close by. The crucifixion marked his lair. Ochs was a lion with his prey. The body on the cross testified to his dominion.

At the upper rim of the hollow, the crowd held back as if it were an arena. Nathan Lee couldn’t slow his momentum, much less halt it. He felt propelled. The horde was his bane, but also his main chance, witnesses to whatever was about to unfold. There was no time to deliberate. He cast himself down the slight decline, and it was like falling. He grabbed at every detail.

Izzy was still alive up there.

Ochs had his back to the rim. He was facing a host of warriors near the foot of the cross, sermonizing, voice deep, a priest and his prop.

A soldier on the outer edge glanced up at Nathan Lee’s approach. He had a red cross painted up the bridge of his nose and across his forehead. He decided the newcomer must belong or else he wouldn’t be here, and returned his attention to Ochs.

Nathan Lee went deeper. Suddenly it all seemed so effortless. His feet hardly touched the ground. His path was decided.

The cross was a tall thing, with no ladder in sight. The executioners had rooted the stem in a hole and shimmed it with boulders and pieces of wood.

Izzy’s teeth were bared. The veins in his neck looked like something on an Olympic powerlifter. He was straining with all his might, gaining an inch, losing it. It was a delicate act. Every movement was agony. His head hooked back against the wood, anything to aid his climb for air.

In mid-stride, Nathan Lee bent and reached under his pant leg. He’d taped the knife to his shin, handle down, and it came loose with one motion. He was sure someone in the crowd would call an alarm. But not a voice lifted.

Ochs raised his long arms, blessing them, summoning the apocalypse. His back was wide and bare, laced with whip scars, all bone and stretched leather. Through the lucid skin, his scapula showed like wings. Men knelt on the cold soil around the cross. Ochs was invoking Izzy’s suffering. He gave thanks for his example.

For an instant Nathan Lee felt time slip. Myth was their gravity. The past was the present. His head spun.

Izzy’s toes showed beneath an upside-down, white-and-black Texas license plate, balling, then spreading apart with simian pain. Crucifying a man was something of a lost art. They’d had to invent a little, using sixteen-penny nails driven through stainless steel washers and old license plates so that his wrists and ankles wouldn’t tear loose.

Ochs paused. The tall cross swayed with Izzy’s fragile motions. In the silence, the wood squeaked.

Nathan Lee quickened his step. No holding back. Now others noticed his approach, but without concern. Each step he took made him more trustworthy.

Overhead, Izzy opened his eyes. He blinked at the sky and the dark, wheeling birds. Then he peered down, skull pressed sideways against the wood. That was when he caught sight of Nathan Lee. His eyes lit up.

Ochs saw the instant of hope where hope did not belong. That was his warning. He started to turn.

Nathan Lee didn’t feel his legs jump. Somehow he was suddenly just airborne. He landed against Ochs’s bony back. Ochs struggled, but for once Nathan Lee had the advantage. He bulldogged the giant backward. Nathan Lee had never practiced anything like this, never wielded a knife in anger. Yet it all came together.

Ochs collapsed under his weight. He fell to his knees. That quickly, Nathan Lee found himself facing the band of soldiers and the cross. He glanced down, and there was Ochs’s head tucked in the crook of his arm. His fingers were locked behind the far side of that big jaw; the knife was under that throat. He owned the man’s life.

For the next few moments, they were like a forest at rest. The crowd ringing the rim above, the disbelieving warriors, everyone was still. You could hear the ravens calling overhead, and Izzy’s soft, panting breaths, like a climber in very thin air. Frost piped from his teeth.

Nathan Lee cranked back. He aimed Ochs’s face at the cross, and tightened his knife hand.

Near the back, one of the soldiers tried angling to one side to flank him. “I don’t need more excuses,” Nathan Lee told them. “Move back. Lay down those guns.” His words smoked in the cold air, straight out of some Western.

When no one moved, Nathan Lee gave the knife a tug, not much, an inch, enough to cut the skin. Ochs’s blood ran along the blade. It was hot on his fingers.

They obeyed by fits and starts, shuffling back. “More,” said Nathan Lee. The gap grew. Soon the ground was littered with rifles and cheap handguns.

“They sent you,” said a man. “The city.”

“They didn’t need to,” said Nathan Lee. “This is personal.”

“You came,” rasped Ochs. He sounded joyful.

He wants this,
Nathan Lee realized. Again he felt that dizzying vertigo, the sense of myth. He was a twig being swept along on a big river.

“You know each other?” said a tall soldier.

Nathan Lee watched their eyes. They were angry eyes, deadly and calculating, but most of them were fixed on his face, not Ochs’s. That said something. His trespass shocked them. It offended them as men of action. No doubt some felt brute loyalty to Ochs. But the majority of their outrage seemed more prideful than distressed.
Their prophet was not beloved.
Indeed, as their surprise was wearing off, Nathan Lee saw several trading glances, full of conspiracy. Ochs’s hostage value was dwindling by the heartbeat.

“Go ahead, make your speech. Or kill him,” a man called. “You can’t stop us.”

Nathan Lee looked up at Izzy. There was very little blood. Someone had rigged a plastic soda bottle on a pole to give him water. He was being kept alive. Eventually his strength would give out and he would suffocate.

“I came to take him down,” Nathan Lee said. He made his voice loud for people to hear. The crowd on the rim behind him rippled. Good or bad, he couldn’t tell. Maybe they cherished the torture. But just maybe it had gone sour for them.

“He’s nailed up there, you idiot,” one said. The notion of undoing the execution boggled their minds. Izzy had been judged. That was final.

“Look at him,” a tall soldier reasoned. “It’s all but over.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” said Nathan Lee.

Ochs pulled at his arm. Nathan Lee dug his feet in and reeled back. Ochs’s spine bowed. His vertebrae creaked. The man quit fighting.

“You’ll never make it out alive,” a voice called at him.

“That’s not the idea,” said Nathan Lee.

“No ladder. No hammer. This should be a trick.” They were amused.

It was a towering thing. The wood alone probably weighed two hundred pounds. He couldn’t do this alone.

“Help me,” Nathan Lee answered simply. It slipped out of his mouth.

They gawked. The absurdity stupefied them. The assassin wanted a favor?

“I can finish off your friend,” the tall soldier offered to Nathan Lee. He spoke quietly. Privately. “Is that what you want?” It was not unkind.

“He deserves better that that,” said Nathan Lee.

“Don’t we all?” mocked a man.

“Yes,” said Nathan Lee. “We do.”

It started to snow just then. People looked up at the sky. The flakes fell in sloppy wet clots. For a minute, that preoccupied them all. The ground was cold as iron. The snow didn’t melt. It pasted the land white.

“What about him?” the tall soldier asked. He thrust his chin at Ochs.

Nathan Lee looked around at them. They waited with hard eyes. The snow nested in their wild hair.
They want me to do it,
he realized. The soldier was offering to finish off Izzy, if Nathan Lee would finish off Ochs.

Now he saw it. Ochs had hectored and blessed and seduced them. The giant had inhabited the darkest lake in their souls and mired them in their worst fears and foulest hate. He had steered their confusion into havoc and now their havoc into slaughter. They were weary. They hurt. They were dying. They didn’t want to be Ochs’s sacrifice anymore. But no one knew the way out anymore.

Nathan Lee felt Ochs’s great, bald head turning slick in his grasp. Before it was too late, he could punish all the wrongs Ochs had heaped on him. With one arc of his fist, the world would be rid of this creature.
And then what?

Nathan Lee lifted his face to the gathering storm. The snow slid from his cheekbones. It slapped upon his wire-rim glasses. He tried to see, but the world was a smear. He was blind. And then it was suddenly all so plain.

Blood for blood.
Nathan Lee knew it. He knew it to his core.

He saw the order of things with crystal clarity. These ravaged pilgrims didn’t know it yet, but the knife was their signal. For weeks Ochs had been preaching invasion. But they wouldn’t go.
Seasoning,
Ochs had called their stalled misery. They were collectively waiting for something, some sign or event. Now they would have it. His blood would spur them. Ochs couldn’t prompt the invasion in life, only in death. And he knew it. That explained his joy at Nathan Lee’s arrival. Ochs had to die. And like a prophecy fulfilling, Nathan Lee had come down off the mountain to do the job and martyr him.

Nathan Lee lowered his face from the sky. It seemed like he could see a thousand miles. He saw himself from high above. Ochs wasn’t the city’s worst danger. Nathan Lee was. His hatred and this knife were Ochs’s vehicle. His deliverance. Nathan Lee recoiled inside himself.

The tall soldier pressed him. “Decide.”

Nathan Lee’s grip eased. Ochs felt him hesitate. He pressed his throat against the blade. He urged Nathan Lee. “Grace,” he spoke through clenched teeth.

All his life, it seemed, Nathan Lee had been climbing, scratching holds into the mountain, pulling at the world. And never finding his answers. Never letting go. He let go. “I can’t save you,” he murmured.

The tall soldier frowned. Others around him showed disappointment, too. Ochs was about to be loosed on them once again.

Nathan Lee opened his hands. The knife dropped on the dirt. He released his enemy.

With that, Ochs rose up with a roar. He loomed in front of Nathan Lee, eyes terrible, his naked chest striped with scars. In some ascetic fit, he had cut his own nipples off. That frightened Nathan Lee more than anything. He had sliced away his most tender flesh in the name of God. “Now,” Ochs declared.