by Jeff Long
Nathan Lee fell silent. Miranda thought it must have to do with his own loss. He looked haunted.
“He was very proud of her,” she quickly summarized.
Nathan Lee stayed quiet.
“Why don’t I grate the cheese?” she offered.
“Sure,” he said.
She changed the topic to the latest skirmishing. “The blood labs are at odds with the liver lab now. Which is crippled by its enzyme departments. Skin sabotaged Brain last week. Hippocampus is arguing with Neocortex. It’s a farce,” she said. “The corpus is devouring itself.”
Nathan Lee emerged from his thoughts. “I know,” he said. “I see it. I hear it. I was standing in line the other day. Two guys behind me. And they were admiring the virus. One of them wondered why it chose such a flimsy thing as man. They’ve fallen in love with it, you know.”
“What was that?”
“The virus,” he repeated. “People love it. Not like,” he wagged his finger back and forth from her to him, “between people. It’s more like reverence. They’ve subordinated themselves to it. The virus is like a deity. No one talks about it as an invader.” He took a big pinch of the Parmesan cheese from under her grater and sprinkled it across the omelette.
“That’s…wrong,” she said. It was an awful notion. Grotesque. “We haven’t even seen the thing yet. It’s an idea. Well, an expression. We see its signature.”
But he was right. She saw it in an instant. They loved the thing that was killing them.
He didn’t argue. “That’s probably enough cheese,” he commented.
Miranda looked down, and she had furiously grated another small pile. She lay the grater aside, and went around to her stool and glass of wine.
“No one has seen what you’ve seen,” she said. “The plague is still unbelievable to us.”
“I haven’t seen it either,” he reminded her. “Only the shockwaves.”
“After you got here,” she said, “I pulled up some of the satellite feeds. I wanted to see what you came through. From space, the continents are dark. The lights are turned off. It looks like we lost.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Tell me about America.” Ever since his appearance out of nowhere, Miranda had wanted to ask him about the day-after world. The question had seemed too personal, but now she realized it was only too personal to her. She didn’t want to know what it was like in her own country. But part of her did. The nation still teemed with people, and though it was no longer really a nation, it was still America. Surely, she thought.
“I’ve been here a month,” he said. “It’s changed even more, I’m sure.”
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
He looked at her eyes. He decided. Very softly he said, “So green.”
It hung a moment. Her eyes? She looked away. She reached for the bottle.
He went on. “I don’t know what I expected. A world of ash? But it was summer down there. The daisies and bluebonnets were in bloom. I drove through hundreds of miles of them growing out of cracks in the highway.”
He wiggled the frying pan. “One morning, I woke up and there must have been a hundred big hot air balloons riding overhead, people in wicker baskets. Every color and pattern. They shouted good morning to me. They waved at me. They were happy.”
“They were riding balloons?”
“It was pure whimsy. It was like a picnic in the air. I don’t know where they think they were going. I don’t think they knew. The wind just took them.” He shook his head, still astonished.
“What about the fires?” she asked. “What about the cities? Is it true about the Great Lakes war?” Toronto and Buffalo were said to be in an uneasy alliance against Montreal. Quebec had blockaded the St. Lawrence. Detroit had launched its own fleet of privateers. The nation had given way to city-states, to cabals of generals and senators.
“I was warned to get around them,” he said. “You could see some of it from a distance, especially at night. It must be over by now.”
“What could you see at night?” she pressed. He was trying to keep this pleasant. Now that she’d opened it up, she wanted to know the reality.
“The prairie fires were awesome,” he offered. “They made it hard to sleep some nights, even with them fifty miles off. They turned the whole horizon orange. You could hear them far off. They sounded like freight trains.”
“The cities,” she said.
“The cities were bonfires. I stayed far away from them. I took the back roads. I went slow. There were snipers. And nail boards to punch your tires. And piano wire.”
“What for?”
“They string the wire at throat level to get the bicycle riders. It’s almost impossible to see, especially if you’re going fast. There’s a lot of bicycles out. A land of bikes.” Her shock at the piano wire must have showed. “One night, I slept in a cornfield. Young corn. I never knew this, but you can hear it growing.” He was trying to distract her. It was working.
“You mean the stalks rustling in the breeze,” she said.
“No,” he said. “No breeze. Totally still. The ears getting bigger. The leaves unfolding. It makes a sound.”
She had never thought about that. Then she returned to chasing the reality. “These bad people, you’re talking about. The snipers….”
“Taking care of their own,” he said. “There is no good or bad.”
“Shooting innocent people?”
“Providing for their families. Or clans. Whatever’s left.”
“I thought there was martial law.”
“There was. They say the Army kept I-70 open all the way through spring. They escorted the convoys, hunted the highway robbers, protected the blood stations. They did what they could, but it got out of hand. I passed…so many…executions. Bodies hanging from high-voltage towers. Or tied up to fence posts. Or just shot in the ditches. It was like something out of the dark ages. You could tell the Army’s work. They made a public display of it along the roadsides.”
“That’s going on?”
“Not anymore. Not the Army. There’s only so long a soldier will go without pay. And most of them had families. I-70 was the last sea-to-sea corridor. It was closed by the time I wanted to use it.”
The Army was falling apart. “The generals have told told us nothing like that,” she said.
“Have you ever read about the conquistadores?” he said. “First thing they did when they landed in the New World was to cut ties with the monarchy. This was back when kings got their authority straight from God, same as the pope. All of a sudden, the conquistadores found themselves in a world without a god.”
“You’re comparing the generals to warlords?”
“I don’t see anybody in charge of them.”
My father, she didn’t say. And the President and Joint Chiefs, bunkered in NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain. And two hundred years of democracy. She did not consider herself a patriot. But democracy was their god. He was scaring her. “They get their authority from the people,” she insisted.
“Miranda.” He murmured the chastisement.
She tipped the bottle. It was empty. Not good. Too fast. “I know it’s grim,” she stated.
“It’s different, is what I’m saying. It’s not the way it was,” he said, “but also it’s just the way it was. I came to some of these little towns, and it was surreal. Like the clock had stopped fifty years ago. They were untouched. Not a worry. Men cutting their lawns with hand mowers. Lemonade for a nickel. Boys painting white fences. You’d think they’d never heard of the plague.”
“Out of sight, out of mind?”
“A little bit of that, I’m sure,” he said. “But also no one thinks they’re next. It’s not denial. It’s belief. They all think they’re destined to survive. I must have heard a hundred reasons why the plague is going to pass them over. Their family’s genes are strong, or they lived more decently, or their food is healthier, or the jogging they do, or the praying.”
“B
ut that’s so deluded. What about the blackout? The end of oil? The food riots?”
“Distant thunder,” he answered. “Until it’s right on you….”
“It is right on them.”
“But they’re Americans,” he said. “In their hearts and minds they’re ready for anything. You wouldn’t believe how ready. They’re prepared. It’s second nature to them. They’ve been taking cover ever since Sputnik. And there’s nothing the plague can throw at them that Hollywood hasn’t already come up with. Hell, they’ve survived the plague a dozen times. Think Stephen King. The Andromeda Strain. Camus. The Decameron. Thucydides. Life is just imitating art. Catastrophes are renewal. Out there, people still talk about the gas rationing in the seventies, and Mount St. Helens and the Yellowstone fire and Hurricane Mitch. The big power blackouts, the blizzard years, Waco, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, floods, the Depression, Vietnam. All those things are legends to them. Like parables. Lessons.”
“Reasons to hope?” she offered.
“Sure. America always survives. People are excited. They can’t wait to clean up the mess and start all over again.”
“You make them sound foolish.”
“They’re not.”
“You think we’re making fools of them,” she said. “Our promise of a cure.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What if there is no cure?”
He looked at her. “Is that what you’re saying?”
She shut her mouth.
“There,” he said, flapping the omelette shut. “Our meal’s ready and now I’ve spoiled it.”
AFTER DINNER, they went outside to look at the stars. He asked about her life, but it sounded trite next to his stories. She had been raised among walls. She had already been ensconced at Los Alamos when the nation collapsed, beyond reach. The Lab—or the Hill, or the Mesa, or Atomic City—was an island above it all.
Nathan Lee called it a citadel, a city within a city. He compared Los Alamos to the ziggaruts in Ur and the Acropolis above Athens and the Pentagon or Kremlin. Here was the keep of power, closed off from common people, the place of retreat in times of siege. He made it sound like a great landmark in history.
He wanted to know how the town had grown into a city. She told him about the waves of international scientists arriving like immigrants with their suitcases and families, and the overthrow of the weaponeers. For over a half century, Los Alamos had been dedicated to nuclear weapons research and development and reduction. Almost overnight, the biosciences—scorned as soft, or squishy, by physicists and engineers—had reared up and taken the place over. There had been epic turf battles, but Elise had prevailed and brought order and honed their new mission, to find Corfu and contain it.
For a time, the scientists had bonded. They had competed, but as a brotherhood. From virology to genetics and primate paleobiology, each of the specialties had its own esprit de corps, its own labs, its own pursuits. At first, discovery boomed. The structure of every protein in everything from worms to man had been captured on disc. Plasma rods were invented for detecting Corfu in the air. Satellites tracked the geographic progression of the disease.
Once Corfu fell to them, a new golden age of medicine was going to be ushered in. In hunting the virus, they had found cures for TB, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and every type of cancer. Neural and optic fibers had been synthesized. People with cord injuries would stand up and walk. The blind would see. The deaf would hear. All of that awaited them.
Then Elise had died, and Cavendish took over. One fence came to hold many fences. Its secrecy ate at them. It spawned distrust. Soon the fractures appeared.
Now the older families lorded over the newer ones. Those who had been academics snubbed former industry researchers who snubbed former government scientists. Those who’d hunted AIDS felt slighted by those who’d gone after Ebola and other “wild” viruses. The internationals thought the Americans had it lucky. The Americans thought the internationals had blown it. The security guards—many of whom held Ph.D.’s in now-useless fields like nuclear weapons design—resented the bio-scientists. The scientists viewed security as “creeps.” There was dissension between labs, dissension within them. Every bench worker wanted his or her own lab. Reigning over it all was Cavendish, who encouraged their anarchy.
“Sometimes I think they’ve discovered too much,” she said. “Maybe there’s a limit to what we can know. I never thought I’d be saying that.”
“Don’t be disappointed in them.”
“I’m disappointed in me.”
“What more can you do?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re only nineteen, Miranda.”
She pointed the wine bottle at him. She was a little drunk. “Damn the Captain,” she said.
“He didn’t tell me. You see what I mean, though.”
“Step back, little girl, let the ship sink?”
“You’re trying to save these people,” he said. “But you can’t do that. They have to save themselves.”
She pointed across the abyss to where the lights of Santa Fe once shone. “It’s them, out there, I’m trying to save.”
They both followed her aim. And their eyes traveled north. A star was shooting through the night.
“Did you see that?” she breathed.
It happened again. Then suddenly there was a whole shower of them.
“I forgot,” he said. “Tonight’s the night. The Perseids.”
Miranda knew what they were. She knew which quadrant they occupied, which constellation they took their name from. But she had never seen them. The meteors streaked in great livid bunches. They were so beautiful.
She sat there, and her heart stirred. Now she understood what he had meant. Summer. It was summer.
The meteors flashed through the sky. They watched for half an hour. Her thoughts streaked this way and that.
She wanted a lover.
Miranda put the wine glass away from her. Enough.
A lover, she thought.
The shooting stars strafed the neat order of things. No wreckage up there, just a loosening of the astronomical pattern. A bit of tempest in the dark.
Not a boyfriend, she considered. Nothing cute. A man. One who could trespass on her solitude, and speak kindly of a terrible world, and sneak them in among the constellations like this. One who believed in forever.
Miranda threw a glance at him. She couldn’t see his face in the darkness, only the slight gleam of his shirt. Why not, whoever he was? The meteors flickered. Here, then gone.
The kiss…she kept her thoughts away from it. It should have a life of its own. But then? She tried to read the future. She tried to calculate the arc of them.
She felt her blood moving faster. His lip, she remembered. They would need to be gentle on him. She heard herself breathing.
Then her cell phone beeped. “Oh, god,” she muttered.
“What?”
“I know who this is.” She went inside with it. When she returned, she said, “My father.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes and no. He’s faraway. A half mile underground near the border of Texas, preparing the sanctuary.” She paused. “He had your file sitting in front of him.”
She let the implications sink in.
They were being watched. Possibly they were two heat signatures in someone’s night scope. Maybe her kitchen was bugged. Probably.
“Man,” he whispered.
The spell was broken. The Perseids continued their display in vain. The taste of wine was suddenly too sweet. She was going to have a headache in the morning.
“I should go,” he said. The lawn chair creaked in the night.
She didn’t agree. She didn’t disagree. “You wanted something,” she said.
“That,” he said. He had to remember so far back. It pleased her. The night had taken off with him, too. So close. “It was about the Year Zero clones,” he said.
“Yes?” Business, indeed.
“I
don’t know what all has been done to them,” he said.
“Do we need to talk about that tonight?”
“No. It’s just that they’ve been turned inside out in search of the plague. I mean these guys look like a butcher shop or something.”
She let out a deep sigh. He was going to hector her about the abuses. Condemn her for their birth. They would argue. She would order him to leave. They needed to go through the ugly motions. “Yes,” she braced herself.
“Well, I started wondering,” he said. “Has anyone ever just asked them?”
She paused. “About the plague?”
“It was just a thought,” he said. “Who knows what they might have to tell us?”
23
Into the Sun
THE REST OF AUGUST
I need to see their eyes,” he told her next day. She made him follow her through the hallways. “They need to see mine.”
She was fiercely protective. “They’re patients as much as inmates. They’re wounded, even the ones who were never touched. Just by being brought back. They’re in shock. When you said talk to them, I thought you meant to use the intercoms.”
“The guards tried that once. They said the clones acted like it was the voice of God. They were in a state of terror for days.”
“You want contact,” she clarified.
“Yes.”
“That means they’ll need to be inoculated,” she said. “Two thousand years of disease have evolved since they died. Their blood is pure. We’re lucky Tara survived you.”
He chased her. “This needs to be done outdoors,” he added. “In the sun.”
She resisted. “What if one escaped? One did. He almost killed himself getting loose.”
Nathan Lee was ready. He showed her his pencil sketch for a courtyard with high walls. “We can make it in the parking lot on the side of Alpha Lab. It’s empty. There’s a tree in the middle. The housing department has prefab concrete slabs, thirty feet tall.”
“Who is this for?” she demanded. “You or them?”