Year Zero (7 page)

His anger melted. Miranda could see he was curious. But, she cautioned herself, Paul Abbot was never fatally curious the way so many scientists are. That was his nature. He had the self-control to shut down his intellectual attachment before it ever chain reacted. So far as she knew, he had no vulnerabilities. She’d come to realize the pity of that. Every daughter should have some power over her father, and she had none.

“Come up,” he repeated, “please. Away from the water.”

What was with the water?
“Will you listen?” She bargained. “No prejudgements. With an open mind.”

“Yes,” he said, “just come here.”

She climbed up the ledges with the packages of fish and joined him at the rim.

For a moment, they were both disconcerted by how much she had grown. He had always seemed so tall. Now she could look him straight in the eye. He made a motion that could have been the overture to a hug or, alternately, the means to balance himself. With him, love and dignity were essentially the same. Miranda let the arm hover for a moment, then leaned in. She gave him a quick embrace, though sideways, so that he wouldn’t notice her new breasts as well. Her womanhood was none of his business.

“You changed your hair again,” he remarked. It had been eight months.

Snakes for hair. Very Einstein. “You noticed,” she said.
Don’t you remember me?
she wanted to say to him.
I’m your baby.
But he was immune, and she knew it.

He neatly shot his sleeve to check the time. “Ten minutes,” he announced to her, then held up his hand and flashed five fingers twice. Ten. It was a signal. She looked around at the forest, and whoever he’d come in with—his driver or assistants, or maybe the director of the labs—was keeping out of sight while he had this little one-on-one with his prodigal daughter. Then she saw movement on the far side of the quarry. Dressed in camouflage, they could have been soldiers or poachers. Or field biologists.

She ripped open the newspaper wrapping a bloody piece of cod. “Catch,” she said, and lobbed it at her father. He snagged it inches from his creased slacks.

He held the raw flesh. “Okay,” he said. “Now what?”

They were more comfortable this way, him on slow burn and short of time, her glib and exercising maximum self-defense. “It’s called breakfast,” she said. “Give it a toss.”

He pitched the fish underhanded and it slapped flat on the thin ice. They waited. No Winston. “He’s probably frightened,” she said. “He’s never seen a man before.”

“He’s watching us? Through the ice?” Her father took a half step back from the edge.

“Don’t worry, he doesn’t eat people.”

“Yet,” her father stated.

“Don’t be silly. We gave grasshoppers a try,” she brightly explained. “Winston’s strictly a fish man, though.”

“You haven’t seen the pieces of animal, then?”

He wasn’t asking a question. He was springing a trap.

“What are you talking about?”

“The bones. The carcasses. The egg shells and feathers. Scattered all over the forest floor. Winston’s quite a hunter. The list of species is impressive. Comprehensive. He’s essentially sterilized the forest in a half-mile radius. Everything from mice, squirrels, and raccoons to owls and jays. Even a deer, though it’s uncertain if it was wounded during the hunting season or he actually brought it down himself.”

Miranda turned to the water, trying to hide her shock. Winston had been leaving the pond? Moving up the food chain? He could climb trees? Cross land? Kill? What made her nervous was that he had a secret life she knew nothing about. “He barely weighs forty pounds,” she said.

“There’s more field work to do,” her father went on, “but it’s clear your creation is getting bolder. He’s widening his feeding range in concentric circles. At first he was tentative and stuck close to home. But the freshest kill was found almost a mile away. If you must know, that’s what prompted our discovery of the quarry. A homeowner called the sheriff’s department. This was yesterday morning. The lady didn’t see the killing, only what was left. Her golden retriever had just whelped. Winston tore the mother to pieces and ate most of the litter.”

“I don’t believe you.” She was automatic. “There are other wild animals on the island. All kinds of predators. Foxes. Coyotes.”

“Miranda, he brought one of the puppies back to play with.” Her father pointed to a tree leaning over the quarry. Miranda flinched at the awful sight, the puppy, a rag doll in the birch. “He broke its legs and left it in the crook. We can only speculate why he went to all the extra trouble. Was it a trophy? A midnight snack?”

Still warm from her body heat, the chunk of fish steamed out on the ice. It began to melt through. Miranda finally said, “I haven’t seen any evidence of that.”

“Then maybe you weren’t supposed to.”

She frowned at him.

“He kept the corridor around your trail clean,” her father said. “It’s possible he was hiding his kills from you.”

Oddly…wrongly, but she couldn’t help herself…Miranda’s horror lifted. “Winston!” she murmured to herself. Then, to her father, she said, “Do you know what that means?”

“To tell the truth,” he replied, “I don’t know what any of this means.”

She was excited now. “Self-consciousness. Intelligence.”

“That’s enough, Miranda….”

“You have no idea. His cognitive function is…unreal.”

At that moment they saw a dark shape glancing beneath the ice. It moved with the silence of ink. His back sheared a fraction of an inch beneath the water, purple and orange, more spirit than body. Her father pointed. She nodded yes. It was him.

Abruptly the shadow cut a swift crescent beneath the surface and the slab of cod was gone. It happened so quickly. All that remained was a fish-sized hole in the ice.

Her father sounded like he was leaking air. For the moment, despite himself, he was astounded. “Will he return?”

“Yes.” Miranda knew what to look for. She saw the air bubbles in his wake, nestling like beads against glass. His coming filled her with such happiness it amazed her. It wasn’t the food that drew him up from the depths, that was plain now. He knew how to take care of his wants. Rather it was the dawn itself. Winston loved the sunlight. And her. It was that pure and simple. She wondered how the first light must look from underneath the ice. Like a ceiling of rainbows, she decided.

At the same time, she felt betrayed by his kills. That wasn’t exactly true. It wasn’t his hunting that disappointed her, but his maturing. She had brought him into being, and now he had grown beyond her understanding. He was no longer dependent.

“Where is he?” said her father.

Winston breached. He speared up from the ice through an explosion of shards, and seemed to hang in midair. His stomach was the color of ripe citrus fruit. Then he twisted and punched back through the glass. There was a loud icebreaker crack. He was gone again.

“My god,” her father whispered.

Way to go, Winston,
thought Miranda. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she said.

He was shocked. “That face.” He had seen it.

“He’s very expressive.” Highlight the positive, she thought. Gain time. Let them get used to each other. “He smiles. Frowns. Shows fear. Sorrow.”

Miranda untied a second bundle. It held a lobster, his favorite. “Winston,” she called, and threw it high in the air.

The monster arced upward to catch it, shattering the thin ice. Once more he was caught in the sunlight, his slick skin gleaming, webbed feet pushing at the water, arms outspread. His natural grace only heightened the grotesque. With the head and face of an ape, absolutely hairless, he was a blend of beings, neither one thing nor another entirely. He caught the lobster in hands with short knuckles and waxy nails, the tips crimson, his palms white. She’d held those fingers. They had whorls. Winston had fingerprints. And bright jade-green eyes.

At the tip of his apogee, Winston looked across at them. His ears, small nubbins with holes, rotated toward them. He was sizing up the stranger. An expression of…delight…formed on his face. Then he plunged back through the ice.

“You really did it, didn’t you?” her father muttered. He was trembling. He had seen the eyes. They were Miranda’s eyes. In turn, Miranda’s were the green, green eyes of a woman neither of them ever spoke about. “You dared.”

“There’s more,” Miranda calmly replied. She knew her world was about to change. From here on, it was simply a matter of degree. Her fatalism felt ancient. The only unknown was what her father planned for Winston.

“I’ve seen enough.”

“No,” she said, “you haven’t. For once let me have your open mind.”

He waved that away. “You’re being transferred. You’ve turned into a cowboy, a cowgirl, whatever. A loose cannon. Someone should have been watching over you more closely. Guiding you. Imparting respect for the system. I’ve spoken with an old friend.”

They were always old friends, her guardians and regents and keepers. “Who this time?” she asked.

“Elise Golding.”

“Elise?” breathed Miranda.

It was Elise, at the funeral, who had gotten down on her knees behind a bewildered little girl and helped press her palms together and whispered a prayer in her ear for her to whisper. While Paul Abbot wept, it was Elise who had helped Miranda send her mother to the angels in Heaven.

“She’ll take you on the condition that you promise….”

Miranda didn’t hear the rest. Any conditions were her father’s bully threats. Elise would take her without condition, and she knew it. A warmth ran through her.

“You leave today. This morning,” her father finished. “You’ve caused havoc at Jax, but the director has agreed to clean up your mess. The sheriff has been taken care of. This whole thing never happened.”

“This morning?”

“Your bags are packed.”

“You can’t do this.”

“You’re going to Los Alamos. The University of California oversees operations there. Elise has found a spot for you. They say you have golden fingers.”

“But Winston….” she began.

“I can only save you,” he said.

“I can’t just abandon him. He needs me.”

“It will be safer for you there, Miranda.”

“He would never hurt me.”

“It’s not your creature that I’m worried about.”

She hesitated. His voice had retreated into his bureaucratic shadows. Again she heard it, his fear. Profound fear.

“You’ve heard about these micro-outbreaks in Europe?” he asked. “A mystery virus.”

“And in South Africa,” she said. “But that was weeks ago. And they were confined to two or three labs. It’s over.” With a shrug, she quipped, “Ebola happens.”

“It wasn’t Ebola,” he said.

Each of the outbreaks had involved reputable labs specializing in DNA typing, not disease research. None used more than rudimentary bio-safety measures. The real mystery was why any of them had been handling a virus in the first place. There was quiet talk that ecoterrorists might have mailed the deadly samples, or a Unabomber with his own private stash of contagion. In the scientific community it had become common wisdom that the outbreaks had been hemorrhagic fever of some type, probably Ebola. Transmission was by contact, she’d heard. But it might also be aerosol. The authorities had gone into standard defensive posture, neither confirming nor denying the accidents. They had let the tabloids exaggerate it to flesh-eating absurdity. The public quickly quit believing it was anything more than entertainment. Miranda had quit paying attention.

“They did contain it, though,” she said.

“Slammed the door shut on it,” her father said firmly. “But it was a close call.”

She felt an edge of fear, less for the “close call,” than his adamant closure. “What was it?”

“We don’t have a fix on it yet. It attacks the skin. Then it goes straight for the brain.”

She thought about that for a moment. Skin, then brain, what was the connection there? The symptoms started with the most external organ, and then jumped to the most internal organ.

“Of course,” she realized. “They originate from the same tissue.” She wanted to dispense with his riddle, demonstrate her virtuosity.
Cowboy!
He was watching her.

“In early development, the outer layer of the fetal ball envaginates,” she recited. “The outside becomes the inside. The ectoderm creates a tube, an empty space, that becomes the spinal cord and brain. At the cell level, skin and the nervous system are the same thing. That’s why melanoma is so deadly. It shows up on the skin, then goes straight for the nerve cells.”

He was impressed, she could tell. But impressed enough? Would he grant her probation, let her follow through with her slippery creation? “That’s probably what’s at work with this new disease,” he said.

“Skin,” she went on. “Touch. Contact. Is that how it spreads?” What about aerosol transmission? Was it blood-or water-borne? How long can it survive outside its host? Where does it come from? Have you mapped its proteins?” The questions bubbled out.

“We haven’t figured out its natural reservoir,” her father said. “No one has seen it. We have no idea if it’s even a virus. We don’t know.”