Year Zero (48 page)

Then her panic spent itself. She was too tired. And cold. She couldn’t seem to get warm. A blanket, a little sleep, that’s what she needed. After that she could start to inventory what was left of Eden.

S
HE WOKE
, on the floor of someone’s office, to the sound of elevator doors opening and closing at the end of the hallway. Had someone returned? She almost turned on the light, then heard the crash of glassware. A door banged open. More glass broke. Men’s voices filtered down the corridor.

She edged the door wider and darted her head out. At the far end of the hall, hunched like a hunter, a man was carrying a broken pipe for a spear. He disappeared around the corner.
Dear god,
she thought.
Survivors.

It was nearly seven in the morning. Time enough, she realized, for anyone to have ascended the highway from the valley. Nathan Lee’s words floated to her.
Be careful what you wish for. You want them to be lambs. But what if they’re wolves.

The bomb must have spared hundreds, if not thousands of the pilgrims. Huddled in their canyons and arroyos miles away, the blast might have passed right over them. And now they had come, for their
hajj
or simply for their pound of flesh. They would destroy the city. She tasted the bitterness.
You destroyed yourself.

More doors crashed open. Furniture tipped over. The ransacking went on.

Footsteps approached. She tried to reckon their numbers. One, it seemed. Limping. Images of Hiroshima sprang at her, flash-burned victims, skin hanging. Mad as hell.

A tall silhouette rippled across the door’s opaque glass. The footsteps passed. She waited a minute, then eased the door open an inch at a time. The floor was spotted with bloody, barefoot prints.

Glass splintered in an office door. Miranda heard yelling, wild men, a babel of words. They were hunting. They would find her eventually. She armed herself with a champagne bottle left over from someone’s office party, then put it down.

Her only hope was the elevator. Miranda’s thoughts raced. Once up to the first floor, she could bolt for the back exit, hide in the forest or in a cave. The mesa walls were pockmarked with them. She could outwait the invaders, raid for food, at night make a fire. Food! She stuffed her pockets with food, little packets of crackers and candy. She found a box of kitchen matches. An idea came to her.

More crashing, more shattering of glass. They were searching room to room.

She took one of the matches and scratched it on the box, and held the flame beneath the glass rod on the fire detector. It took forever, it seemed.

Abruptly, the sprinkler system bucked on. Chemical mist hissed from the ceiling nozzle. Office and hall lights winked off, and were replaced by strobes. The alarm began honking savagely.

She heard men running past, shouting, bare feet slapping the wet floor. One slipped, skidded, banged hard against her door. His shadow rose up, ran on.

At last their voices dimmed. She opened the door. The elevator was only fifty feet away.
Walk or run?
She did both in small bursts. Broken windows on office doors gaped like ragged jaws. Glass lay everywhere. Chairs and desks had been thrown so hard against the walls they hung from the dry wall. Books had been ripped to shreds, papers scattered. They were in a fury, laying waste to everything. Their hatred made her weak.

Miranda reached the elevator, hair dripping. The doors stood shut. She pushed the Up button, then, for good measure, the Down button. She backed into the well of the door frame and waited.

The sprinklers went on raining down. The alarm was deafening. She pushed the buttons again.

A man gave a shout at the far end of the corridor. They’d spotted her. Two more rounded the corner. Miranda forced herself to stay and wait.

The three men came sprinting up the hallway. It was a foot race to reach her first. The strobes cast tiger stripes on them, dark, then bright, then dark. They had knives, an axe, a club.

Miranda stabbed the buttons.

Their bare feet gripped the linoleum like flesh claws. They were so fast. She slapped at the buttons with her open palm. Where was the elevator?

Too late she saw the sign to one side:
In Case of Fire, Use Stairs.
Of course. Her heart sank. She’d bluffed herself into a corner. The building’s power would have shut down at the first alarm. And yet the buttons were lighted. She stabbed them again. With nowhere to run, she slugged her back against the doors, faced her hunters.

It was only in the final thirty feet that she caught sight of their faces, and for an instant her terror changed to surprise. These weren’t outsiders. How could she have forgotten them?

“Eesho?” she said.

It was him in the lead, the false messiah. His eyes grew large. Only now did he recognize her, the woman who had humiliated and terrorized him. The false mother.

Her father’s word sprang from the distant past, Ochs’s word, too:
abominations.

Who had let them out? What did it matter? She was trapped with her own handiwork. For a moment she felt pity for them all, for the men torn from their grave, for herself in her confusion, but especially for the life growing in her womb. It was dizzying. Her world had broken loose of its neat orbit. If there was a lesson that was it, the oldest lesson: once in motion her creations had a life of their own.

More of the clones arrived, soaked by the sprinklers, their arms and feet bleeding from glass, eyes jacked wide with adrenaline, armed with kitchenware and pieces of the building and industrial garbage. One gripped a meat cleaver. Miranda recognized its beat-up wood handle and leather loop. It came from the bone lab. Without knowing it, the clones had found their own remains.

Eesho raised his axe. She wanted to plead for her child. Too late. She signified everything that was evil to him. Even if she could have spoken his language, there was no arguing with that. Her womb and fertility were simply one more malignancy to be chopped down.

The moment slowed. He was bellowing at her, some curse or justification. His words turned to slurry. Every detail sharpened. She saw the veins on his forehead and raised one arm to try ward away the axe.

She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. The axe blade reached its apogee. And stopped. Beneath the ugly honking alarm, there was a sudden, absurd, merry
ping.

Eesho looked up. The doors slid open behind her. Miranda tumbled backward. The elevator car was dry and dimly lighted. Miranda scuttled back from the clones…and struck the legs of a man inside.

His face took her breath, a ripped, sewn rag of a face. He peered down with reptilian detachment, then looked out at the other clones, their hair and beards slicked flat with the synthetic rain. They had her.

He laid one hand on her head and cocked her face back to look more closely. “Miranda,” he uttered, and patted her head. She belonged to him now.

She had never met Ben, had refused in fact. But she knew him. Like the rest of Los Alamos, she had become familiar with his fright mask of scar tissue. Of all their monsters, it was he who had best suited their dread and most excused the pains they inflicted. His was the least human of faces. But he had been Nathan Lee’s favorite, and he knew her name somehow. What had Nathan Lee told him?

Eesho burst into an angry tirade. Ben answered him sternly. She didn’t understand a word. The alarms throbbed like a giant heartbeat. The strobes lashed them. They looked like creatures etched by lightning, lurid, then shadowy, flickering in and out of existence. They craned to hear Ben. He seemed to be countering Eesho’s ultimatums with a choice of some kind.

At last a man stepped forward from the bunched crowd. Eesho tried to block him from entering the elevator, and the man went around him. Another approached. Eesho grabbed his arm, and the man shoved him to the ground. One by one, they edged around him.

The smell of sweat and chemicals filled the car. They jostled to make room. The sudden peace was almost ludicrous to her. They contradicted themselves, full of rage one instant, sober and patient the next. As the doors closed, only Eesho remained out there, still bellowing at them from the shadows. The noise shut away.

For a moment, the elevator didn’t move. Ben carefully, studiously pressed the button for the first floor. Nathan Lee had trained him well. The gesture wasn’t lost on the others. He was guiding them out of here.

The ride was short. She squeezed into the back corner. No one said a word. For a minute, they were all just fellow passengers.

The car came to a halt.

Even as the doors opened, Miranda saw bodies lying in a row on the lobby floor, and their pile of ugly, makeshift weapons. At a small distance, hidden behind columns and scarred riot shields, soldiers were pointing their guns at the mouth of the elevator. “Cut the power,” she heard a man shout. “Lock it open. We got a full load this time.”

The light inside the elevator went out.

“Ben!” the voice called. “You in there? Is he in there? I can’t see.”

With a shout, the clones pressed to the sides of the elevator car, shoving backward from the doors, trapping Miranda behind them. She was tall, and could see over their shoulders and between their heads. The lobby was so bright. It was blinding at first.

The entrance to Alpha Lab faced due east. The winter sun was just rising, its rays glancing straight in. Now she saw a throng of people in front of the building, out in the parking lot. They looked like figures made of light, walking back and forth, keeping vigil, waiting.

The world assembled in an instant. The convoy must have turned around. Her city had returned!

“Ben.” A shout. “What you got? Bring them out. One at a time. No running. Don’t need more blood. Tell ’em.”

“He can’t understand English,” someone complained.

“Some, he does.”

The bodies on the floor were clones, she comprehended, hogtied, face down, hands and feet cinched with plastic ties. One lay crumpled and still in a wide pool of blood. The lobby reeked of cordite and riot gas. It came to her. The soldiers were putting down a prison break. One floor at a time, they were flushing out the sub-basements, repossessing the building, and Ben was helping. He was their worm on a hook, drawing their monsters up from the deep.

Out in the lobby, the mood grew tense. “Shoot one,” a soldier recommended. “They’ll come.”

“Don’t,” called Miranda.

The lobby fell silent.

“Miranda?” This new voice was old. Worn out. Thrown too hard, too long. The Captain must have been searching all night for her.

“Captain.” She kept her tone calm.

The Captain appeared from behind a column. “Hold fire. Not one shot.” He wore a riot helmet with the visor up, his long hair hanging down his shoulders. His hair looked white this morning. “Can you run?” he asked.

With one step, she could have left her captors behind. They would be returned to their cells. The violent strays like Eesho would be rounded up. It could be over.

Their escape was finished, and they knew it. She saw Ben’s eyes on the far side of the car, watching her. There was no fear in his eyes, only hope, though not a desperate hope. He looked reconciled to whatever came next. He spoke, and the others moved out of her way.

It struck Miranda. He had been handpicked by Nathan Lee and coached to guide his comrades away from Los Alamos. Instead, he’d stayed. The fugitive had chosen to collaborate with his captors…to go searching for her. He had put himself at risk…to save her. But why? She chased the thought. Before descending to his death, Nathan Lee must have sought Ben out. It made perfect sense. Of all people, he would have chosen this wanderer, this sphinx-like escapee, in whom to confide his decision. Whatever it was they had talked about, Ben had shaped it into a promise. To her. And then she realized…
to her child.
Nathan Lee’s child. That was the heart of it.

She stepped from the elevator. “Move to your left,” the Captain told her. “You’re in the line of fire.”

She looked back at the elevator, and saw the fury of their battling. The wall and metal frame were torn with bullet holes. Blood streaked the ceiling. Further up the hallway, one of the clones had tried leaping through a plate-glass window. His body hung on the shards. Riot gas was sucking through the shattered gap.

“Miranda,” said the Captain. “They’re dangerous. Let us do our job.”

Where had she heard that before? Her father, she remembered, at the pond, long ago. And Ochs, that time, stealing the child, throwing her into darkness.
Never again.
She held her ground. She glanced outside, through the front door, at the milling people. “You came back,” she commented.

The Captain frowned. He followed her gaze. “Them? They never left. We’re the ones who stayed.”

“But the city was empty. I saw it.”

“People hid in their houses. It was nighttime. A terrible night. We waited for daylight.” He added, “Not you, though. I should have known.”

So the convoy had gone. “How many are there?”

“A few hundred. Mostly scientists. We’re still going house to house. People are in shock. They can’t believe what they’ve done to themselves. They’re afraid. We don’t know who stayed and who left. We were starting to think maybe you’d gone, too.”