by Jeff Long
He selected a second corpse, one that was in the open, away from the tangled heaps. It was a young woman lying face down. Her hands were exposed, and her skin was not transparent, but black, baked by the sun, preserved and polished by the cold and wind. She had bound her black braids with strands of turquoise strung on white yak hair.
Nathan Lee remembered being awestruck at the sight of Tibetan girls like her. She would have had powerful high cheekbones and almond eyes and very white teeth. They could be awesome beauties, and awesome flirts. He remembered some of the archaeologists at Everest razzing him. Have one, Professor Ochs had urged him. That came back to him, Ochs prodding him, even in the beginning, to do what he should not do.
His first assumption was that they were plague victims. The French couple had been right, but wrong. Nothing about these cascades of bodies falling from the truck beds suggested forgetfulness. Certainly there were no invisible men or women. Whatever it was, the disease was not supernatural. It was infectious. It killed quickly. Almost instantaneously.
And yet something didn’t seem right. Why had so many people died in one place at one time? What were they doing out here? Where were they running to? What were they running from? Only then did Nathan Lee notice that the entire convoy had been heading west…away from China and into the barrens.
They had been racing away from the center. Something sudden had spooked their stampede. It was almost as if a gun had been fired.
He looked through the sprawled bodies. There were no soldiers. No settlers from the eastern lowlands. These were all ethnic Tibetans. He frowned. Had the races been separated out? A different, more grisly pattern presented itself. Could it be that this was no die-off, but a killing field?
But if this were a massacre, where was its agent? Where were the machine gun shells? Where were the exploded trucks? And where were the vultures and dogs? Not one of the bodies had been touched. Not one had a wound.
Then he found a vulture. And dogs. And ravens. And mice. They lay scattered among the dead. They had been stricken down in the act of taking their feast. A few minutes later, he happened across a dull orange canister. It was partially embedded in the earth. Stencilled on the underside was the universal skull and crossbones.
It was a bomb. The nozzle was a simple aerosol spray. Nerve gas. He straightened.
Now that he knew what to look for, he saw five more orange cylinders, some sticking in the earth, others lying where they’d bounced and rolled. It was simple to see now. The airplanes—perhaps only one, why more?—had flown from the northeast and caught the caravan in the open.
That would explain the mass panic, the rapid deaths, the dead carnivores. He recalled the lack of animals. Ever since entering Tibet, no birds, no grazing yak, no antelope. The food chain had been poisoned from top to bottom. The People’s Republic had killed a whole geography.
He conjured a map of Asia. It was his only way of thinking through the horror, by looking down from a great distance. It needed a God’s-eye view. It needed history. He remembered the dynamited road leading to Nepal.
And then he saw it. He saw the ebb and flow of time. He saw epic ruins. Empires shifting. He saw the ruthless logic.
This was no mere genocide. The Middle Kingdom had retreated, as always in its times of crisis, behind a Great Wall. China had brought its true children—the Han—into the fortress and closed the gates. Except this time the great wall was made of chemical toxins, not stone.
The PRC had salted the earth. They had created a firewall. He envisioned a massive dead zone ringing the core. Most likely it stretched from Manchuria to its western border with India. Millions might already have been sacrificed. He did not have to ask why anymore. Here lay the outer edge of a quarantine.
Nathan Lee sagged to the ground.
The plague was real.
And it had no cure.
THERE IS BIRTH in death. Good in bad. Innocence in guilt. That was reality. Life contradicted itself. One minute the wind was speeding prayers to the gods; the next it was filled with poison. This was the earth he had inherited. His choice was simple. Use it or lose it. He became king of the dead. He went plundering.
Nerve gas, he vaguely recalled, dissipated within hours or days. The whole concept of chemical warfare rested on a gas that would decompose before it drifted back onto your own troops. He decided that since it hadn’t already killed him, the plain was no longer contaminated.
With a glance at the last ounces of sun, he rested his bike against a truck, and climbed into the empty cab. The fuel gauge showed half full. The wind horses were with him. This wasn’t like Nepal, where the nation’s petroleum reserve had slowly dried to zero. Here the trucks had been fueled up and on the move when the Chinese struck with their nerve gas.
The battery was dead. No surprise there. Most of the batteries were old, and the cold would have sapped their charge. Patiently he moved down the line. He pulled drivers from their deathgrips on the steering wheels, testing each ignition. None gave the slightest stir. No dashboard lights flickered. He walked to the next truck, and the next.
The sun toppled behind the mountains. The wind returned. It whistled among the still metal. Exhaust pipes hooted like organ pipes. The wind moaned in the hollow mouths of the dead.
He came to another truck and the cab was empty. He fought the door open against the wind and clambered into the cab and let the door slam shut. While he waited for his hands to thaw, the truck shuddered in the blasts of wind. Dirt hissed against the glass. Pebbles clattered like shot.
He reached for the key. The wind raged so hard, he barely heard the engine turn over. He pawed at the panel, found a knob, and gave a yank. Light poured from the headlamps.
The highway and plains jumped up from the darkness. The dead seemed to spring from nowhere. In the beams of hard white light, the massacre site was appalling and restless. Loosened clothing fluttered like beating wings.
The gauge read a quarter full. Behind the seat he found what he expected, a funnel and a coiled plastic tube that stunk of diesel fuel. Up ahead, in the shadowy bed of a truck, he saw a jerry can lying on its side. It would hold ten gallons. There were more like it in other trucks, some empty, others brimming with pink diesel fuel. His gas station was at hand.
The discovery of a functioning truck changed him. Suddenly he had real mobility. With the truck, he could carry all he could eat. He could begin to put flesh back on his bones. No more crawling through the winter. The truck would provide heat and shelter. With luck and good roads, he could plow through Tibet and the Gobi and Siberia in a month, not a year. He sat at the wheel, contemplating his excellent new future.
Carefully he put the truck in gear and eased forward. He was thankful for the deafening wind. For the most part, it drowned the sound of bones under his tires. Weaving in and out of the doomed convoy with its canopies arched taut or flapping like torn sail, he was reminded of a phantom wagon train. He went through dozens of trucks, taking their fuel and any food. He manhandled three spare tires into the rear bed. He found a blowtorch for heating water or thawing his engine block. He loaded in gnarled firewood, blankets, a rug, oil, grease, and water.
Almost reluctantly, he took notice of the gold. It was glinting in the headlights, a dull shining color among the colorless mummies. There were thick bangles and earrings and necklaces made of it. He tried to ignore the small fortune out there. But eventually he was going to reach civilization, and when he did it was going to cost him coin. Never again would he count on human kindness. The world didn’t work like that.
Nathan Lee descended upon the bodies with a knife and wire cutters. Jackals and raptors warred with the dead like this, scraping and grunting, taking what the bone did not want to give. At the outer edges of his headlight beams, he disengaged. His sack was bulging with plunder.
WITH A SLOW, WIDE U-TURN, Nathan Lee left the massacre behind. That night he covered more territory than in the entire last month. He reached Shigatse, and it was a sprawling necropolis, bo
dies everywhere. A great, intricate monastery stood like a gravestone above the city. He didn’t stop. There was nothing for him here. On the outskirts, he passed a fuel station, and it had been blown up.
The road forked north and turned to dirt again. He made another two hundred kilometers by dark, then made a fire and brewed tea and slept a few hours. Over the coming days, he passed other massacre sites. Solitary vehicles appeared in the distance like far islands, but on investigation they were generally mangled and scorched black from explosives or strafing. The Chinese had killed everything that moved.
Day after day, he followed empty roads. He passed lakes like mirrors, and mountains spalled with light, and prayer flags on thin wands in the middle of nowhere. The world loomed large. Every day he felt smaller. He visited a monastery, and the prayer hall was neatly lined with skeletons in robes, some still sitting. Another time he found a herd of wild horses, hounded by some pilot and felled with an orange cylinder of nerve gas.
He entered Mongolia, pausing at the empty border station to stamp another souvenir visa in his book. At night he saw missiles streaking back and forth beneath the stars. Even faced with the end of the world, old empires were using up their arsenals to settle old scores. Nathan Lee was glad to be in no-man’s-land.
At the end of December, his truck bogged in a dune of voluptuous red sand. He wasted a day trying to dig it free, then resigned himself to traveling by bike again…only to find a brand new Land Rover waiting on the far side of the dune. Its engine came to life after he unbolted the truck’s battery and carted it across the sand and hooked up the jump cables. A second and third day went into slogging back and forth with fuel, food and gear to his new rig. On his last trip, the dune was swallowing his old truck.
The Land Rover proved faster and more nimble than the truck. It set a new precedent, as well. No more nursing the beast along, he drove hard and changed vehicles without hesitation, taking another Land Rover, then a minibus, then another truck. The weeks passed and he grew lost, though that wasn’t exactly true. It didn’t matter that his Bartholomew’s map no longer worked. He had a compass and his journal, a direction and a past.
Somewhere in Siberia it had to be, he came to a bridge just at dusk. His only warning of danger was a car lying on its top like an upended turtle. Something had flipped it upside down. Land mines, he registered, and hit the brakes. An instant later his windshield shattered, and the sniper’s gunshot reached him from across the water.
Nathan Lee crawled from the passenger side, taking only his book and the bag of gold. He hid in a marsh until darkness, then crept to a river. Ice lined the banks, but by tossing twigs out onto the water he was able to figure which way it ran and followed the current. He had no idea of the river’s name. But the sea was inevitable.
9
After Hours
LOS ALAMOS
JANUARY
Golding entered unannounced in the middle of the night. Two months had passed since her last visit to see Miranda. There was no more prolonging this. Alpha Lab had run amok. The lab—the project in its entirety—had to be decapitated. Cavendish had to go.
She advanced down the hallway, trundling her little oxygen set behind like a pet on wheels. At times like this, she longed for her husband Victor. The nasal cannula dangling over each ear made her feel conspicuous and vulnerable and old. She wanted to appear commanding tonight. But of late, her doctors insisted. They didn’t like her traveling at all, much less above sea level. Los Alamos is going to mug you someday. But this needed doing. And so she was going into battle dangling plastic tubes and carting her air, alone and on her own authority.
None of the other regents knew she was coming. A simple majority could have stopped her, but they were in disarray, the universities on a virtual war footing, teetering on a statewide shutdown. Parents had yanked their children from schools at every level. Teachers taught via the net, if at all. Fear was consuming knowledge just when knowledge was needed most. No one, it seemed, was watching over Cavendish, no one but her.
She could have terminated Cavendish by phone or registered letter, or summoned him to her. But Cavendish’s minions and collaborators needed to be taught a lesson right here on the turf he’d seized. It wasn’t just Alpha Lab. With biofast research overtaking Los Alamos, the whole place was barreling out of control. Those who didn’t like the new direction or objected to the ethical breakdown had exited the Lab in droves, leaving the renegades with greater autonomy. An example had to be made.
The Corfu pandemic could not have broken out at a better time for Cavendish. As the mysterious contagion spread, panic had ripped apart the fabric. Europe was balkanizing and in shock. Africa was dead. Officials in Washington demanded a cure, or at least a genetic bomb shelter for the American people. Cavendish had offered himself as the man of the hour. He promised the moon. His credibility lay in his incredibility. His human clone—still considered a top secret, but regularly introduced to visiting VIPs—was walking, talking proof of Cavendish’s ability and daring. Thank god for his arrogance, she thought. He had stolen Miranda’s thunder, elbowed her aside completely, and that was all for the better. Miranda could still be spared.
Despite Golding’s efforts to curb or block Cavendish’s spending, money had continued to flow to him…at least while there was such a thing as money. For a time, his burn rate—the speed with which he burned up money on purchases—had rivaled some of the greats: interferon research as AIDS caught on, the Apollo space program, R&D for Star Wars. There was apparently no ceiling to his expenditures, because technically the money had not existed. Somehow he’d convinced the administration to label the virus hunt a black project. That meant funds poured in from discretionary accounts the Congressional bean counters would never lay eyes on. He spent with a vengeance bordering on contempt. Ironically, his expenditures bolstered his reputation as The Man. Thrift would have undermined his promises of a cure.
His multibillion-dollar shopping spree included everything from petri dishes to Cray computers to the construction of state-of-the-art level-4 Bio Safety Labs. With walls two feet thick, BSL-4’s were the most exclusive zoos in the world, reserved for the most lethal microbes, from Ebola, Machupo, hantaviruses, and now the meta-outbreak of Corfu. Until eight months ago only a half dozen BSL-4’s existed on the planet: two in Russia, one in Canada, three in the U.S., and not one in all of Europe, Africa, or Asia. Now, within a mile of one another, there were five BSL-4’s on Los Alamos’s southern mesa finger. In one fell swoop, the place had anointed itself headquarters for the war on Corfu. Like Cavendish, Los Alamos had become an upstart the science world could not ignore.
The expanded infrastructure needed people, of course. Cavendish had spent on that, too. The new hires weren’t all his doing, but he set a tone. His tastes ran towards apostates and rebels and daredevils and outlaws. After the fact—always after the fact—Golding saw the application files. In one way or another, rightly or wrongly, most of these new émigrés to the Mesa felt that they had been wronged. Their careers had been marginalized in some way, or they’d been passed over for tenure, or their grant proposals had been unjustly turned down, or their research spurned. One was a reproductive endocrinologist before his in vitro clinic in Florida was firebombed by evangelicals. An oncology researcher had lost his license after the death of a terminally ill child he’d treated with an untested monoclonal cure. Many were ghosts from biomania, that great Wall Street surge of the 80s and 90s. When the bubble burst, many highly skilled scientists had been left bankrupt or eking out their days as lab techs or high school biology teachers.
It was these kinds of people—the jilted, the disenfranchised, the biotech ronin—whom Cavendish had helped gather into the bosom of Los Alamos. Golding knew the type well. On a daily basis, the vast University of California system turned away such disgraced scientists. It was no surprise that they had come so gladly into the New Mexico desert, and gave Cavendish such loyalty.
He didn’t offer them much in real wo
rld terms. There were no Silicon Valley-type neighborhoods. The labs—springing up like daisies—were housed in mothballed buildings, Quonset huts, even in Army field tents. The offices held metal government-issue furniture. Time was kept by old-fashioned caged wall clocks. Some of the chalkboards were the very same ones physicists had crammed with equations during World War II. What Cavendish offered was a second chance. Life after death.
He also gave them secrecy. That was the greatest danger. It was the Wild West all over again, a frontier in every lab, with no Wyatt Earp in sight.
The elevator door opened silently. Golding descended to sub-C, the floor holding offices that looked over the cloning bay. She paused by a window. Divers were midwifing yet another clone in the delivery tank’s radiant blue water. The procedure had become perfunctory. There was no audience of lab workers, only a team of medics waiting on deck. Miranda was not among the divers. They went about their job, opening the womb sac, ushering the clone from one life to another. A curtain of hair eddied and whorled around the body. Golding went on.
A light showed under Cavendish’s door. Golding straightened her jacket. On second thought she removed the cannula and parked her oxygen cart to one side. She could manage without canned air for the few minutes this would take. She gave a sharp rap.
“Come in,” said Cavendish.
Golding entered. And froze. “Paul?” she whispered.
Sitting beside Cavendish, Abbot was waiting for her. He stood up, ever the gentleman. He did not insult her with a familiar touch. No kiss on the cheek. He didn’t make excuses. “I thought I should be here for this,” he said. His face said otherwise. This wasn’t his idea.
“Sit, please,” Cavendish said.