by Jeff Long
For a fleeting moment, Miranda tried to remember when Nathan Lee had fled. He must have been running just ahead of that viral onslaught. It was a miracle anyone could have survived. Yet he had. And so, apparently, had someone else, though differently. Could this be a Category One Survivor?
Maples returned to the ghostly green figure sitting in front of the fire.
“Do you know what this means?” someone whispered.
“It would be wrong to jump to conclusions,” another warned.
“A survivor!” murmured Miranda’s neighbor. “Category One.”
Miranda kept staring at the figure on the screen. It could have been a caveman crouching close to his little tongue of flame, all alone in the night.
“A freak occurrence,” a voice scoffed. “A fluke.”
“Exactly what we’re looking for,” someone retorted.
“Not necessarily,” Cavendish cautioned. “We don’t know what we’re looking at here. There are three reasons a person might survive a parasite this lethal: luck, natural resistance, or immunity. We saw that with AIDS and Ebola and Marburg.”
“We also saw it with polio, the Black Death, and every other pandemic in human history,” said Miranda. “But the point here is that we’ve never seen it with Corfu. An immunity event!”
Her thoughts ricocheted. This changed everything, potentially. Ever since Corfu had broken loose and run rampant, they had been searching for survivors. That was the whole excuse for cloning the Year Zero specimens: they had needed to reach back in time to find any survivors of the virus, even of the more benign, ancient strain. But here, in the heart of Calcutta, squatted a modern survivor.
“There’s more,” interrupted Maples. “Once we identified the Calcutta event, we started a computer search for more campfires, not just in India, but on all the continents and major islands, and not just for last night but for all the nights for six months past. There are millions of images to investigate, and the search will go on for weeks or months. But look at what we’ve found in a few short hours!”
The images began dancing around the world. The date codes on the margins changed back and forth. It was September in Spain, June in Borneo, February in Moscow. Now that they knew what to look for, the tableful of scientists spotted the pinpoints of light with increasing ease. They got up from the table and gathered in front of the video screen, pressing together, barking at each new discovery.
In the space of five minutes, with Maples guiding them, they found evidence of at least nineteen other survival “events,” as the Red Surveillance team had already christened the campfires. Maples was like a puppy. “I’ve assigned some of my ASTER crew to examine old tapes for fires first, body heat second. The fires are most pronounced. They’re tagging each of these events and tracking backwards and forwards in time. We now know that the Calcutta event has been occurring in the same place for the past three weeks. Fires have also been located in Rome, Perth, Phnom Penh, Kinshasa, and Vladivostok. From one night to another, some have moved from place to place. That suggests migration. Opportunistic. Or driven by fear. Some stay in place. All are located in cities. That probably means the survivors are subsisting on whatever they can loot from the ruins. We can only guess. They must be like Robinson Crusoe, most of them, alone or in pairs or tiny groups, slowly going primitive.”
The Santiago event had five human-shaped heat signatures. The survivors were finding each other. In faraway lands, they were banding together in tribes. There was life after the plague. Now if only the secret of their survival could be unraveled while there was still a civilized world left.
“We must not get excited,” cautioned the Pakistani. “Dr. Cavendish is correct. What are we looking at here? Which kind of survivors are these people?” He held up three fingers. “Are they Category Three? Were they just lucky, hiding in caves or submarines while the plague passed overhead? Did the virus simply miss them? In which case, they are of no use to us. The virus will find them. Once they are exposed, they, too, will die.”
He lowered one finger. “Or are they Category Two, impervious to the virus? Are their bodies somehow inherently resistant? Recall the prostitute study in Tanzania. Year after year of unprotected sex, sometimes with dozens of infected men in a single night, and yet a group of sixty women never developed AIDS. Scientists shadowed them for well over a decade. They came up with every kind of theory. But no one ever learned the secret of their resistance. In which case, these people may be of no use at all in our duel with Corfu.”
He held up a single finger. “Or did the virus actually enter these people? Were they exposed, and did they develop antibodies? Are they Category One? Have their immune systems begun to co-evolve with the virus? In which case,” he wagged his head, “maybe they can save us. Maybe not.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” someone said.
“Go find them?” a voice scoffed. Miranda faced around. It was the head of the Immortality lab. She was still getting used to the division title, though it fit perfectly. Most viruses destroyed their host cells once they were finished using it as a virus factory. Corfu was different. It instructed host cells to keep dividing without ever dying, hence “immortality.” One more mystery, one more lab. “They’re on the far side of the planet,” the lab chief went on. “We might as well be looking at pictures sent back from Mars. We can’t get across our own country, much less around the world.”
“But any one of these survivors could be our answer,” Miranda retorted. “They could be our future.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, the U.S. Navy got swallowed looking for survivors like these.” The scientists turned to Cavendish at the far end of the table, a frail stem with burning eyes. “Our armadas have disappeared. Our military assets have dwindled. Our wings are gone.”
Cavendish lifted a hand at the satellite image on screen. “Even our eyes are failing. We’re getting information from satellites that are falling to earth. Do you understand, Miranda? We can no longer project ourselves into the world. We’ve lost the capability. We don’t own the night. We don’t own the day. It takes a major armed expedition just to reach into Albuquerque for a few hours. Calcutta!” he snorted. The luminous green figure on screen fed another stick into his little fire. “All this proves is that there’s other life in the universe, no more, no less.”
Miranda felt the others looking at her. Once more, she was the sole voice of dissent, or optimism, or whatever she was. For an instant, she resented their cowardice. But she understood it, too. They had families, many of them. They were mortal, and Cavendish was ruthless. Their job was science, not martyrdom. “So we give up, is that it?” she snapped.
“We work with what we have,” Cavendish said. “And when the time comes, we retreat to the WIPP sanctuary. Just as your father planned. This is a distraction. It would give people false hope.”
When, Miranda fumed, not if. Retreat. To the sanctuary. Into her father’s underworld. She glanced around, trying to measure their discouragement and fear. These days they believed in asylum more than they believed in the cure…and it wasn’t even built. The subterranean sanctuary was still under construction. Originally designed to be a graveyard for nuclear waste, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—WIPP—was being converted into a vast hideaway for the entire populace of Los Alamos. Twelve stories of chambers and floors were being carved from a salt dome two thousand feet beneath the desert bordering Texas. It would be equipped with lab facilities. Research would continue while they sheltered beneath the virus world. Someday, perhaps decades from now, they were supposed to emerge with their cure.
But to Miranda and a small contingent of others, the WIPP sanctuary was a terrible mistake. There was no way its labs could match what they already had at Los Alamos. The quarters would be pinched and sunless, an eternal night. Also, it would be vulnerable to even a single strand of the virus. In such close quarters, the plague could devour them in a single bite. Anyway, it was wrong to be talking about retreat. “We have a missio
n,” she protested.
“We have to keep our hopes realistic,” Cavendish said. “Some things are possible, Miranda. Some things are not.”
Just then Maples’s phone beeped. He took the call, then looked around at them. “That was the latest count. We’re up to thirty-nine survivor sightings.”
“Worldwide?” It was the blonde woman from Johannesburg. “My god, is that all? Thirty-nine people…where there were once billions?”
The woman’s country had been killed off long ago. Miranda understood that about her. Defeatism came naturally to her, though that didn’t fully explain her tone of ridicule. She, and probably most of the others in the room, were cueing off of Cavendish, for now displaying their allegiance. Then Miranda saw the woman exchange an admiring glance, and it was not with Cavendish, but with his silent clone, stationed behind the wheelchair. So, thought Miranda, the rumors were true. The clone had bedded her, too. But who was he?
“There will be more than thirty-nine,” Miranda doggedly pronounced.
“A few hundred?” the woman sniffed.
“One in a million, or two million, or ten million,” said Miranda. “It’s better than nothing.”
“Oh, but you see you’re only talking about life.” The woman pointed at the thermal caveman squatting among the ruins of Calcutta. “If that is our future, then civilization is finished.”
“No,” said Miranda. “Not as long as Los Alamos is still alive.” Her defiance was beginning to sound like cheerleading to her, and she was desperately making it up as she went along. But someone had to say something. “We are a city on a hill,” she declared. “A city of light.”
Where had that come from, city of light? They were all looking at her. She wanted to believe their silence was contemplative, but knew they were embarrassed for her. Miranda’s cheeks were hot. “If we can’t go to find the survivors,” she finished, “then maybe they will come to us. Someday.”
“A good swimmer, is he?” joked Cavendish. Touché. The oceans were once again vast barriers.
“There will be survivors in America, too,” Miranda stated. She could feel herself swaying in the breeze, far, far out on a limb of her own making. “Once the virus has passed through, they’ll appear.”
“Like moths, would that be?” said Cavendish. “To the light?”
“I won’t quit,” Miranda said.
It was the wrong thing to say. They thought she was accusing them. She was, but not to drive them away. To inspire them. With insults? She sighed. She was no good at this. Their eyes glazed. When she looked, Cavendish was beaming at her.
21
Resurrection
AUGUST 11
It had always been deathly still on her visits before. But tonight, five stories deep, the Orphanage sounded like the full moon rising, every wild throat up and screaming. As she stormed along the hallway, Miranda could feel the clones’ frenzy vibrating through the steel walls. Her anger rose.
They howled like banshees. Some hurled themselves against the stainless steel doors. Others hid in corners or under their beds. A wild-eyed face hammered against the narrow Plexiglas. Another window was flecked with blood.
Two guards waited at the far end by a locked door. The plastic slider read 01-01N. Clone One. Version One. Neandertal.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Nathan Lee went in,” the big weightlifter volunteered. “He sat down. The kid blew up. Then the rest of them went off.”
Miranda peered through the three-inch window. The view was blurry and brown. Her cell was a nightmare of shit walls and voodoo handprints. The child was caked with her own feces. But tonight there was blood on the girl’s hands. Blood on the walls. To her relief it was Nathan Lee’s blood, not the child’s. He sat at her feet. She had all but lost her voice screaming. It sounded like rust being scraped from the walls.
“What has he done to her?”
“Nothing. He went in. He sat down. That’s all.”
That was everything. The girl had been stripped of her room with the aspen outside the window and a rainbow on the wall. They had taken away her toys and beloved crayons, locked her in this cage deep beneath the ground. She was a bird with broken wings.
The child had no world but the borders of her cell. She never strayed into its center. Perimeter walking, it was called, a symptom of autism, an endless journey of walls. And now, Miranda saw, Nathan Lee had dared to trespass upon what little she possessed. He had blocked her path with his body. He had stolen her mindless walkabout.
“Who let him in?”
The guards were frightened by her anger. They had never seen her like this. “I turned my back,” the one with a jar cut said. “He opened the door.”
She looked again through the window slot.
“He could infect her.”
“We discussed it. Nathan Lee said, what’s worse, to be sick or be dead?”
“You discussed it?”
They quailed.
“How long has he been in there?” she said.
Jarhead consulted his watch. “Twenty-three minutes.”
The Captain arrived. He peered through the slot. “Great,” he muttered, “he went and did it.”
“You knew he might go in there?” she said.
“I had a feeling.”
“What happened to ‘no contact’?” She’d never talked down to the Captain. She couldn’t help herself.
“He was warned.”
“She’s been through too much.” She was ready to hit somebody. “He’s gone. Do you hear me?” She heard herself, talking like Cavendish.
“He’s on our side, Miranda.”
“How do you know that?”
The Captain peeked at the scene inside. He shook his head. “The man is taking his punishment.”
The girl had the strength of a teenage boy. For twenty minutes, Nathan Lee had been sitting there while she beat and clawed at him. His face was swollen. His lips and nose were bleeding. His shirt was in rags. Not once did he raise an arm to ward away the blows. All he did was keep on reading.
Now Miranda saw it. He had brought his storybook with him. So that was it, he’d gone over the edge. Unable to get at Ochs, deprived of his own daughter, he had abducted this one. “He’s traumatized the whole ward,” she said. “Listen to them.”
“I hear. They get like this sometimes.”
“We’ve got to get him out of there.”
Nathan Lee had deceived her. She had deceived herself. The gravity and pureness of his quest had lulled her. It was only a matter of time before he stole some supplies and took Old Paint and vanished again. Miranda took that for granted. But this was the last thing she’d expected from him.
“What do you have in mind?”
“You have people,” she said. “Send them in.”
The Captain frowned. “She’s out of control. Send in the Posse, they’ll have to take her down, too.” The Posse was their crash team, big men with overwhelming force. “She might get hurt.”
“Dart him then. Gas him. The bastard.” She had never been so angry. Nathan Lee had no right to go crazy like this. He was supposed to have been stronger, not just another lamed spirit.
“She might get hurt,” the Captain repeated.
Miranda breathed out.
“She’ll tire out soon,” the Captain reassured her. “They always do.”
Miranda heard the sureness in his voice. Her expertise was the silent mechanisms inside the human cell, his was the violence of wild men, and a feral child. The bedlam rocked her. “How often are they like this?” she asked.
“Now and then. We keep a few sedated. The rest, we let them purge their devils. It’s good for the soul.”
Miranda clenched her fists on either side of the window slot. She tried to remember how long it had been since her last visit with the child. Seven weeks? She was a busy woman. That was her excuse. But the truth was this metal underworld, this place she had created to conceal the damned and the medical leftovers, w
as unbearable to her.
“No sense standing here,” the Captain said. “We can keep an eye on things over the monitor.”
He led her to a darkened room filled with banks of monitors. It was dim and quiet in here. Away from the pandemonium, she began to collect herself.
As she passed the screens, Miranda saw men shouting, clutching their ears, pounding the walls, sitting like catatonic hermits, hopping up and down like apes. Some just lay on their backs staring at the ceiling. The Captain gave her a chair in front of the Neandertal girl’s two screens. Underneath someone had taped a name with a flower. It said Tara.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s Tibetan,” said the Captain. “Nathan Lee said it means Mother Goddess.”
Now she saw other screens with Scotch tape names. “Where did he come up with these?” But it was obvious. The Year Zero thing had gone to his head. It looked like he’d gone grocery shopping through the Bible. There were a Matthew, a Hosea, two Ezekiels, Micah, Zechariah, three Johns, one Eleazar ben Yair, and even a Lazarus. Now she saw the bones and relic fragments lying before each screen, like offerings upon separate altars.
“They’re the real names. He wanted to surprise you.”
“Don’t tell me he’s gone in and talked with them, too?”
“He just listens over the cell mikes. Sometimes they whisper to themselves. Or they rant and rave. Or announce themselves. It’s mostly Aramaic, he says. He spends a lot of time down here. Every day. At night, too. It’s catching. He’s got us all doing it. Once in a while we’ll make out a name or a word.”
Someone had pinned to the bulletin board a short vocabulary list in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, with the English translation. A bookshelf held a small library of video tapes with the names, numbers, and dates, and books on archaeology and museum collections. Nathan Lee had turned the guard room into a university cram session.