Year Zero (49 page)

“Why?” she said. “Why did you stay?”

The Captain frowned at her. “You told us,” he gestured with his rifle, confused. “You said, the sun.”

Miranda’s eyes stung. It was the riot gas, she told herself. And the snow was so bright.
They were waiting for her.

“We’ll start over,” she spoke suddenly.

“Yes,” the Captain encouraged her. “Now will you come away from there?”

He didn’t understand. “All of us together,” she continued more loudly for others to hear. “We’ll begin in the beginning. There aren’t many of us.” She swept her hand at the awful violence, the body dangling in the window. “We can’t afford this. It will take everyone.”

“Miranda,” the Captain pleaded. “Clear away.”

They still didn’t see. She had to show them. She returned to the elevator filled with cowering men and reached inside. She took Ben’s hand and he took another man’s hand. Like that she ushered in the new day, guiding out the string of their ancestors who were their monsters, but their children, too.

D
ECEMBER 31

T
he tall man whistled while he worked, neatly laying out the razor blade and towel, the needle and thread. Handel.
The Messiah.
What else? ’Twas the season.

“Shut your hole,” someone growled from a lower bunk. Day 10, and tempers had frayed. Sleep was precious. The haven was not quite what people had prayed for.

Their
sanctum sanctorum
was a study in sodium chloride. The floors were milled flat. The ceilings were thirteen feet high. Levels Five to Eight were still being expanded after yet another collapse in the salt bed, and wouldn’t be completed for months. Until then, the colony slept in shifts. Each of them got a bunk—and the petite privacy that went with it—for twelve hours at a time. It was like a homeless shelter: A bed, a meal, then back on your feet, Joe.

He kept his curtain drawn. There was just enough headroom to sit upright. Each bunk had a small wall light of its own. He had shed his jumpsuit. Now he examined his scar. The wound in his thigh had healed nicely over the past three months. He prodded the long seam.

Their dayroom walls were thin plastic. He could hear a woman in the neighboring cubicle crying, and men whispering angrily. The culture shock was savage. Streams of people circumambulated outside the rows of barracks, waiting their turns. Their shuffling sounded like a small river. Like a river, their feet had already started to wear a channel into the salt floor.

The air was radically dry. In the space of a few days, their lips and cuticles had already split. Their eyes were red. People couldn’t seem to drink enough water. They were in a desert far beneath the desert, this concealed elite. They were literally becoming the salt of the earth. When it was quiet, the sound of flaking crystals whispered on the plastic roofs. The sanctuary was alive. It was filling in around them.

He rubbed his scar.

Back in Los Alamos, forty years had not seemed insurmountable. It wasn’t going to be easy, nobody had said that. There was bound to be some cabin fever. Deprivations. Adjustments. Internal politics. But overall, they’d envisioned a long night of the soul with great downtime. They were finally going to get to catch up with their families, kick back, do some science, teach and be taught, breed, raise the grandkids. Anchor the species. When they emerged someday, they would be old men and women. Future generations would remember them as giants, that was the idea.

But already their dreams had unraveled. The journey across New Mexico to just this side of Texas had been its own special bit of hell, sixty-seven straight hours locked in with raw sewage washing at their feet, the weak ones going to pieces. Of the six hundred trucks the convoy started with, fully half had not made it. There had been breakdowns, icy roads, a freak dust storm, and land mines galore. Through triple layers of rubber, he had heard the flat whumps of explosions ahead or behind them. Not a pleasant ride, at all. But even mechanical failure, guerrilla ambushes, and gas needles on E did not explain what was being estimated as a fifty percent attrition. The dark rumor was that half of them had been sacrificed along the way. The tall man in the upper bunk didn’t believe it, but the rumor did happen to fit the facts. There was coincidentally just enough room for those who were here.

He regretted the lost trucks and their tens of thousands of passengers. He had hoped to have every single last one accounted for. At present, no one was sure who had and had not made it. Paul Abbot, their king, roamed through the salt corridors, calling his daughter’s name.

The convoy’s castaways were doomed, that much was certain. Those fortunate enough to break out of their locked trailers would have had nowhere to escape. He took some solace in that.

The man considered the razor blade. It was not as sharp as he would have liked. Over the past few days, before he gained ownership of the contraband razor, four people were said to have used it. They’d been clumsy, dulling it on their carpal tendons and bone. But it had worked for them, and was the best to be had.

He laid the edge just so on his scar, and drew the blade. The lips of flesh opened. As the first time, there was surprisingly little blood. The adipose layer was white. The meat was red.

He worked the wound deeper. It ran parallel with the muscle fibers, which—months ago—had allowed a deep envelope without laming him. With time, gravity and muscle movement had worked the glass vial lower between the quadriceps. He had to go searching. It hurt. He resented that.

Part of the entry procedure had been a final purification. Everyone had submitted to multiple blood and urine tests. They had stripped, scrubbed, and walked through an ultraviolet tunnel to piles of sterilized jumpsuits. Their suitcases and duffel bags had never even left the Mesa. Naked as babes, they had entered their crystalline Eden. Quarantine was absolute. The virus didn’t stand a chance down here. That was the idea.

He could hear the family next door, through the wall, prepping the young ones for sleep. A bedtime story.
Goodnight, Moon.
Then prayers. “Our Father, who art in heaven….”

I’ll teach it to them properly,
he thought.
In the original. Aramaic. Whisper it through the wall into their sleep. Why not?

In his short lifetime, he had been many things to many people, a mentor to lost scientists, a psychiatrist to raving soldiers, a friend to the lonely, a guide to the cunning. He had sown false hope, false love, false dreams, even false messiahs. Little by little, he had led them into the pit.

At last he found it nestled against the anterior cruciae. The glass was slippery. He put it in his mouth for safekeeping, then wiped his fingers and started sewing. His suture kit had gone the way of their luggage. He could have made a fuss, being a Cavendish and all. But standing on his authority was exactly what Adam didn’t want. Anonymity, that was the ticket. And so it was an ordinary needle and a spool of green cotton thread he used. The wound was bound to get infected, but not soon enough to save them. He would get miles and miles before they discovered him. He meant to cover every inch of the place.

He bit down. The glass cracked. The liquid seemed warmer than his body temperature, and that was fitting, this being the the hottest strain Los Alamos had every captured. To his surprise, the virus had a pleasing taste. He was reminded of oranges, but with a hint of sea salt.
No, no,
Adam decided, it was more like the bead of a lover’s sweat at that crucial moment, nearing oblivion, when she is just begging to be finished off.

M
AY

T
he big, black cast iron chair occupied a sandstone slab near the outermost tip of the mesa. There Miranda sat, with a pair of binoculars resting in her lap, or what was left of it. It was midday and warm. Her glass of ice water was beaded with dew. A baseball cap shaded her eyes. It could have been an island in the sky out here.

Summer was coming. Miranda had willed it with all her heart. The snows had melted, the noon sun towered, the city was healing. Almost three hundred people had stayed behind. They were all types. Like an old Spanish
entrada,
they were learning to build upon their mix of trades, scientists and soldiers working together, the Cross and the Sword, faith and steel. Each day saw them more ready for what was to come.

Each day her body ripened. Her belly swelled. Her breasts startled her in the mirror, taut and round. They had become identical to the breasts on Nathan Lee’s Matisse nude, which she kept with her other mementos, the gold necklace her mother had left, a treasured seashell, a snapshot of her Monarch butterflies, her map of chromosome 16.

Tara adored the movements in Miranda’s womb. Every day, she visited. The Captain’s wife said the baby was going to be a girl, and while the thought of a little sister could not replace the horse for Tara, it did help. What did not help was the horse itself, which would neither go away nor come in from the wilds.

When she looked out from the edge of the mesa, Miranda no longer envisoned a valley of death. It was still early for wildflowers at this elevation. But the first expeditions had descended five weeks ago, and had reported that the plains grasses were knee-high, and wild cattle were calving, and the rivers were chocolate with run-off. Their dispatches—sent by shortwave from distant places—were like old-time radio, or broadcasts from Mars, filled with crackling static and cosmic whistles and, ultimately, silence. It had been nearly two weeks since they’d heard a word from “out there.” Nevertheless, Los Alamos was still able to track the explorers’ progress via satellite. Three of the expeditions had reached their targets and turned around, and were now making their way homeward. What tales they would tell.

For a doomed people, the citizens of Los Alamos were joyful and industrious. Each of them was terminal now. They had voluntarily been inoculated with the Sera-III. Their three-year countdown had begun. After that, short of a cure, the virus would take them. But that’s where their faith came in. Survivors had been contacted and were—slowly—being brought in. The harvest had begun. The answer was near. They believed that.

It was not an easy faith to hold. All through the winter, glass people had strayed into Los Alamos. That’s what Tara called them. Some had been pilgrims and wayward travelers drawn by the city’s lights. Others had been their former neighbors and coworkers who had returned on foot, castaways from the now infamous convoy. They were not the survivors whom Los Alamos longed for, only more plague victims. There was no need to use moon suits with them nor cage them in the bio-safety labs. Immune for the time being, Miranda and others had set up a hospice to feed and care for the victims in their final days. Certainly there was no lack of spare beds in the city.

It had been grim work nursing the victims, and yet purifying in a way. As they watched bones appear through their patients’ glassy flesh and saw hearts beating in living chests and tracked the sunset of memories, they came to accept that one day that might be them. By April the refugees had all passed away. The cemetery in the golf course bore markers, some with names, those who had remembered them, many without. At any rate, their passage had signaled the end of the great die-off. Shortly after that, five expeditions had set off into America.

While they waited for the explorers’ homecoming, the people of Los Alamos continued to foster their city. There was so much to do, supplies to inventory, research to review, experiments to design, greenhouses to build, the reactor to tweak, satellites to monitor, radio signals to broadcast. The word to spread. Just keeping the lightbulbs changed was a task, but Miranda insisted. They were a beacon. That was her mandate. Every night the city’s bright lights repelled the darkness.

Not all the darkness lay out there. On the chance Cavendish might have left clues behind, Miranda had visited his office in South Sector three months ago, when she was more mobile. She’d wanted to review everything he had, and had not, done during and after his reign, to see inside his head. “Something about him doesn’t add up,” she said to the Captain, who accompanied her. “He knew more than he wanted us to know, I’m sure of it.”

The first thing they had noticed upon breaking into his office was the smell. His wheelchair was there, pointed out at an executive view of the Sangre de Christos. Still sitting upright, the rebel scientist had shriveled to a dry husk. Glass pipettes had been driven through the optic cannula in each eye socket. The pipettes were fragile. His impaling must have taken great care. His murderer could have been anyone.

Cavendish’s killing had become just one more of a million secrets that Los Alamos held. Everyday, foraging parties made new discoveries: warehouses brimming with food and supplies, lab notes with buried insights, bio-safety labs with forgotten subjects, chalkboards scrawled with hieroglyphs. Over a hundred thousand people had vanished in one night last December, and yet they still whispered to those they’d left behind. Every laptop contained a hidden personality. Apartments yielded love letters. Diaries spoke. Windows looked across into other windows. Telescopes on tripods peeked between curtains. Los Alamos had always been a city of dreams, good and bad. That was in the nature of science. What surprised everyone was that it had also been a city of such desire. It made them long for their companions who had fled into the earth.

Weeks ago, on their way south, the New Orleans expedition had visited the silent WIPP sanctuary, hoping to make contact with their lost brethren. But they had found only mummies for sentinels in the surface fortification, and the big elevator shafts leading into the depths echoed back their own shouts. There was little they could do to unravel the colony’s disappearance. They didn’t have ropes long enough to descend the vertical half-mile, so they dropped messages in canisters down the holes, then proceeded on their journey. Their mission was to search for the living, not commune with the dead.

It was known that survivors remained. The hunt for them had started in earnest in February, using satellites, as the last of the great cities gasped out their red death clouds. The thermal imaging had been programmed to highlight any body measuring 98.6 degrees, and immediately the surveillance team had begun sighting human activity. As of the last count yesterday, there were twenty-six survivors within a thousand-mile radius, the projected range of their first wave of expeditions.

You could see the survivors near the logical food sources, the cities and towns, but also out in the farmlands and mountains. Over the past month, Los Alamos had watched one character plow and seed an entire thousand acres outside Cortez Heights, Kansas. The Milwaukee expedition had not yet reached him. For all the farmer knew, he was the last man alive. He probably had no idea he might be immune. And yet, all alone, with his future a dark uncertainty, the man had chosen to plant corn. That, thought Miranda, was hope. She couldn’t wait to shake his hand.

It wouldn’t be long. The expeditions were returning. The Billings expedition was going to be first. Last night’s satellite image had showed them camping on Raton Pass, on the Colorado border, along old I-25. Everyone in the city was excited. Miranda wasn’t the only one sitting along the rim, watching the road that wound up from the valley.

Depending on conditions, the expedition might come in today or tomorrow, or the next day. Their estimated time of arrival was anyone’s guess. Since dawn, the satellite had lost them to albedo effect. It was not unusual for the satellites to go blind during daylight hours. That was when most of the surveillance team got to sleep.

Miranda looked out across the gap at a section of highway cut into the mesa wall, and it was empty. She took a drink of cold water, and closed her eyes. The water seemed more delicious every day.

Then she looked again, and something was flickering along the top of the far peninsula, a white shape, quick among the piñon and scrub. Miranda raised her binoculars and found it easily, their day ghost, the Appaloosa. She was galloping hard, one more mystery that would probably never get explained.

They knew from the remote cameras that Nathan Lee had ridden her down to the river, but crossed on foot. In the aftermath of the bomb and evacuation, everyone had forgotten all about the horse. One day in January she had simply reappeared. It was cold, but she wouldn’t take their shelter. The bomb had permanently spooked her. She carried burn scars, and wouldn’t let anyone come near. Through the rest of winter, every week or so, someone would throw a hay bale out for her, and that kept her alive. Tara had tried chasing the horse, or laying out apples and hiding. But the horse had gone wild, or half wild. She seemed to enjoy their proximity, though not enough to ever be caught or ridden again.

Miranda watched her for another few minutes. The horse slalomed through the low trees, cutting right and left, muscles flashing. Her dust plume sparkled in the sunlight. The fool thing was going to go flying right off the cliff someday, people said. Or run itself to death. Circles within circles, that’s all people saw. But that missed her real mystery. The question was not where the horse was going or what she was running from, nor whether she would ever make up her mind between the city and the abyss. Rather it had to do with the race itself.

A shout went up along the rim. Immediately Miranda shifted the binoculars downward to see the highway. And there they were, on foot, coming around the bend.

Suddenly her breathing just took off. She had to steady her elbows on the chair arms. Her heart raced. She felt a jolt of adrenaline, which woke the baby, who gave a kick.

Miranda touched the focus knob and the explorers grew sharper. The road had changed them. They were brown from the sun. The soldiers had beards. Ben, too. He was near the front. She moved through the faces. Some she recognized, others were new. There were women and children among them.
Survivors!

Abruptly the expedition passed from view. The road wound behind another finger of the mesa. All along the canyon’s edge, people were shouting with excitement. They began to stream away from their perches, racing to greet the travelers as they entered town, and the canyon slowly fell silent.

Miranda stood to join them, but the blood rushed from her head. She lowered herself back to sitting. The iron chair took her weight without a sound.

It wasn’t that she felt heavy or slowed, quite the opposite. Her wings had never been stronger. She had to bully herself to sit there, to take the extra moment. With the arrival of these newcomers, and the coming of her child, life was about to get very busy. She would not have this kind of privacy again, not for years. She pushed aside her crowding thoughts. She sat there.

The sage and rabbit brush were budding. The air was fat with desert scents. Miranda took a deep lungful. Her faintness passed. The world had only seemed to stop for a time. Everything was in motion again. She started to lift her eyes to the sun, but caught on the sight of that never-ending horse across the way. Chopping up the dust, flying through the trees, running like crazy. It was enough to make her smile.