Year Zero

by Jeff Long

  All day long, Nathan Lee sat with his back against the tree, listening to their stories, taking notes. By the fifth week, he could understand so much of their language that Izzy was freed for hours at a stretch. This suited Izzy, who enjoyed slumming among the clones. The courtyard would suddenly ring with laughter, and usually Izzy was at the center of it. Later he would try to explain the jokes to Nathan Lee. Often they had something to do with talking fish or traveling salesmen and farmer’s daughters, all of which had existed in one form or another two thousand years ago.

  Periodically Nathan Lee got up to walk around and stretch his muscles. This morning Joshua, a slight man with long fingers and toes, was describing his part in a great battle. Mordechai, an ugly man with huge ears, was delivering his daily boast about seducing a Roman centurion’s wife. For anyone who would listen, he detailed her round hips and her moans of ecstasy. Micah was declaring his wealth once again, a herd of sheep that, he’d decided, must surely have increased from fifty to five hundred by now.

  “Weren’t any of them plain murderers or thieves?” Nathan Lee wondered to Izzy.

  “You noticed that, too?” said Izzy. “I’ve never met so many patriots, lords, political prisoners, and martyrs of the faith.” It was Kathmandu all over again, a cauldron of fictions and realities, disgrace and glory.

  Nathan Lee’s favorites remained the loners who kept to themselves. They acted as if they had no use for the bragging, nor for sending letters. They stood by the fire, ate the food, circled the yard, but rarely talked. Among these was the fugitive. In Nathan Lee’s opinion, he had the most to talk about, for he had glimpsed the world outside their prison. But so far he had volunteered only his name, Ben. Though he never spoke about his escape, the other prisoners had figured out that much about him. It was written all over his flesh.

  Escape was becoming a popular topic. Eyes were constantly hunting along the tops of the walls. Unaware that Nathan Lee and Izzy were, in effect, their jailers, and that the yard was wired with microphones, they openly discussed ways of getting out. Nathan Lee discovered that John’s picture of a ship disguised deep grooves that could be used for footholds.

  One afternoon a small delegation approached Ben like supplicants, and Nathan Lee roamed closer, curious. They addressed the man with respect, as maal-paa-naa, or teacher. “What is it like beyond the walls?” they asked him.

  “There is a city. A metal city. Then there is the wilderness,” Ben gruffly answered.

  “Is there water? Are their wolves?”

  “It is a dead land,” he answered. “Even the trees are dead.”

  “Are there villages?”

  “All dead.”

  “We’re making preparations,” they invited him.

  “What would you do out there?”

  “Find our homes, what else?”

  He snorted at them.

  “Help us, maal-paa-naa.”

  He turned his back to them and walked away.

  Nathan Lee explained to the Captain about the escape talk, just in case. He didn’t want the guards overreacting. “It’s only talk,” he said, “and they trust me. If anything develops, I’ll hear about it. We can head it off then.”

  The Captain was not alarmed. “Nice to see a bit of starch in them,” he said.

  MIRANDA HEARD ABOUT the escape plotting. She brought it up one evening near the edge of the roof of Alpha Lab. This had become their getaway, a place to share a quick picnic, then return to work. From up here, sitting on an old, cheap Indian blanket spread on the gravel, they had a view to the west of the far valley and north of the lights of Los Alamos across the bridge. Usually they grabbed whatever was at hand on their way to the stairs. Tonight they were eating apples and peanut butter.

  “But what if they really do try something?” Miranda said. “You weren’t here when Ben escaped. It put the whole city in a panic. And he nearly died.”

  “Don’t worry. The lone bolt for freedom is one thing, a matter of desperation or sudden chance. A large-scale breakout is very different. It takes a long time to come together. It rarely happens.”

  He told her about a group of Maoists who had plotted to escape from Badrighot, his Kathmandu jail. “They plotted,” he said. “And plotted and plotted. It went on for months. The conspirators came up with an elaborate plan. But the plan was useless without faith. You have to believe freedom is possible in the first place. In the case of the Maoists, they never broke the mental chains. They never did go for the wall. And the clones won’t either.”

  “But they might. You want them to.”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “What are you so happy about?” she said to him. “Even if they made it out, the virus would do them in.”

  “You said their immune systems have an edge over ours,” Nathan Lee reminded her. “They’d have three years.”

  “They’d be doomed. Three years, that’s all.” She dismissed it.

  “Three years,” Nathan Lee reiterated. “That’s a lot of world.”

  She frowned. “Turning them loose into the plague,” she said, “that would be the same as injecting them with virus. They’re safe here.”

  “I’m not talking about turning them loose.”

  “You’re thinking it, though. I can tell. But it would be a death sentence for them.”

  “For them,” he retorted, “it would be a whole lifetime.”

  She blinked patiently, as if he were dashing around throwing open the shutters, letting in unnecessary light. “Three years,” she said. “Then they’d die. None of them would survive. We know that for a fact. Their clonal twins were exposed to the virus in South Sector labs two and three years ago. At first we had high hopes, because they seemed immune. But then it turned out they’re only protected against whatever benign strain was running along the edges of year zero. And what’s out there now isn’t benign. They’re safe here.”

  “For now,” he said.

  “Once we find the cure,” she said, “they’ll have a real lifetime ahead of them. Thirty years, forty, fifty.”

  Nathan Lee smeared peanut butter on his slice of apple. He took a bite. She utterly believed in the cure. Once, not if. “Put yourself in their place,” he said. “Faced with what they face right now, you’d take three years in a heartbeat. So would I.”

  She gave him a strange look. “If I offered you the certainty of three years versus the possibility of thirty, you’d take the three?”

  “Hypothetically speaking?” he said.

  “Whatever.”

  He felt bold, a little swept away. “Think what we could see out there, Miranda.”

  “We?” she said.

  She had heard it. He let the word hang there. She could it take it how she wanted. It was an invitation, or as much of one as he dared with her…or with himself.

  He was ever mindful of Grace, ever. It wearied him, and his weariness felt like the worst betrayal. His quest had become a curse. His love had become a disease, or worse an abstraction. He loved his daughter because she had been his to love. Now he could not move ahead with or without her. Sometimes he could barely breathe. To speak of freedom like this felt perilous. He was so afraid his heart might change, and then who would he be? But how could he not dream?

  When he didn’t commit himself any deeper, she said, “Is that what you’d do then? Run away?”

  “That’s not what I’d call it.” He suddenly said, “Have you ever seen Paris?”

  “Paris?”

  He rushed on. “It would be all ours. Or Barcelona, or Vienna. The Alps in summer. Or Syria, I know the ruins. And Petra, it’s incredible. The light at noon. The cliffs are red.”

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” She sounded stern. Analytical.

  He quickly backpedaled. “You said we were talking hypothetically.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You did.”

  “That was you.” She was earnest, not playful. He’d blundered.

  “I’m teachi
ng myself to fly,” he stated, scrapping the plural. “I got books from the library. There’s software that walks you through it. Small fixed-wing aircraft. That’s the way to go, hopping from one airfield to another.”

  In his mind’s eye, he had imagined setting off through the grand remains, winging deep between the canyons of New York City, setting off across the Atlantic, looting, handling fantastic treasures, exploring. “Paris would look as ancient as Angkor Wat,” he said. “The Louvre would be mossy. The bodies would be bone. You could camp on the beaches of Greek islands.” She frowned. He corrected himself. “One,” he said, “could sleep on top of the pyramids. I could go wherever I wanted.”

  He knew something about traveling through the land of the dead. With care, he might make it all the way around the planet. The world would devour him, but not before he devoured it.

  “You’re leaving?” she said.

  “Call it a dream,” he said. To love someone who was living, for a change, or at least love someone within his reach. He raced over his guilt, trying to get ahead of it. It was a matter of momentum. If he paused to think of what he was thinking, he would stall.

  “But you can’t,” she said.

  His heart lifted. Was she reaching for him? “I’d never be missed,” he tried.

  “What about the city?”

  Her disbelief backed him off. He had never heard her say it like that, as if she held the life of this place in the palms of her hands.

  “Los Alamos?”

  “Yes,” she insisted. “We need everyone here. It’s all here.”

  “All what?”

  “Everything.” She scooped at the air. “Salvation.”

  She was dead serious. “I thought you were going to say, you know, the last of civilization,” he teased.

  “That, too,” she added without a pause. “When all the other cities are dead, we’ll be the last city.”

  “I guess that’s something to carve on the tombstone,” he said. He wanted one final grand expedition through the ruins. And she wanted to nurse civilization right up to its last gasp. It made him feel lonely, for her as well as him.

  “Don’t you see?” she said. “The survivors will come.”

  “Ah, them,” he said. The missing links.

  “The satellite teams have tracked over seven hundred survivor incidents now. Campfires, mostly, but car headlights, too, and the heat signatures of engines. They’re out there, circling around, keeping alive.” Inheriting the earth, thought Nathan Lee. Doing what I want to do.

  “They’re all overseas,” he pointed out. “They’ll never make it here. They don’t even know we exist.”

  “But there will be American survivors.” Quietly, she said, “Once America dies off. The disease will sort them out.”

  “What makes you think they’ll come here?”

  She gestured at the lights. “They’ll see us from far away.”

  “But who will they be, these survivors?”

  “They could be our last hope,” she said. It was like a mantra. “They may have developed antibodies to modern Corfu….”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I mean who will they be?”

  She was confused. “Americans. Probably people from this land mass, maybe migrant groups drifting south from Canada….”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “You want them to be lambs. But what if they’re wolves?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You have no idea what it’s like out there.”

  She looked away from him at her beloved city.

  “Maybe you should be afraid,” he said.

  She stood up. “I expected better of you,” she said. He listened to her footsteps crunch through the gravel. The door shut behind her. After she was gone, he continued sitting on the edge of the roof, wondering what was real outside of his desire.

  AN HOUR LATER, he reached the outskirts of South Sector, breathing hard. He came here often, always like this, stealing through the trees, covered in night. It was cold, but the jog had warmed him. As always, South Sector lay beyond the forest like an island of light. For a place with such a dark reputation, it was ungodly bright. Klieg lights blazed. The fence line glittered like a a silvery wall.

  It had become a regular stand-off. South Sector held Ochs. Ochs held the secret of Grace. Nathan Lee had the wire cutters and the knife to cut her free. But not the courage. It was more than that. He had lost his direction. The world had never seemed so immense. What if Ochs was only an excuse to be lost? What if Grace no longer existed? He dueled with his doubts.

  Nathan Lee edged through the trees. The tops of scattered clusters of buildings stood above the gleaming dike of triple fence. He drew closer. The compound foreshortened. At last he could see only guard towers and coils of razor wire and warning signs surrounding it.

  The cleared earth blazed white. There was no in-between in that no man’s land. No shadows allowed. It was always like this. The clones wanted out. He wanted in.

  They would catch him. That was a given. The clearing was marked. It was mined and there were sensors and cameras and patrols. Even so, he might have stepped into the light. But he didn’t trust his destiny.

  “Nathan Lee.”

  He ignored the whisper. It was the forest. The wind.

  The voice whispered again. This time, he ducked and turned, and it was Miranda.

  She shifted in the screen of brush and woods. The shadows striped her. Her eyes were green lights in the darkness.

  She had followed him. He was flustered, as much by her stealth as by his carelessness. You had to run to stay with her, but that was by day. Where had she learned to move through the night? There was no path in here. From night to night he wasn’t sure how he would approach.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  The forest changed her. She was Miranda, but different. She moved backward into the deeper shadows. She was sure of herself. His foot snapped a twig. He lost sight of her. She moved, and he found her again. The shadows streamed like water.

  He followed her further and further away from South Sector. The light dwindled. She paused. She didn’t stop, only let him catch up. She stayed in motion, latticed by shadows.

  “How did you find me?” he said.

  She tsk’ed. He was easy stalking. And it wasn’t her first time. It rattled him. She had watched him slouching on the border of light. He felt foolish.

  “I come here to think,” he said.

  She wouldn’t quit moving. She paced. He had to twist in circles to follow her.

  “Why throw yourself away?” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You want to.”

  “Want,” he said bitterly. “Everything I want, I can’t have. I’m faking it.”

  “It’s stupid.” She was angry. Her hand shoved at him. He stumbled.

  She started to push him again, but this time Nathan Lee caught her wrist. It felt like he was falling or holding on for dear life. Miranda could have jerked from his grip. Instead, she pulled, but not to pull away. She drew him in.

  Later they would make a game of it, each accusing the other of stealing the first kiss. Then they would take turns laying claim to it. Then they would start over with each other all over again, telling and retelling their beginning until finally it felt woven into the myth of them. All lovers do it, creating the world fresh around them. The only difference is that some have less time for it than others. And so they hurried to catch up with themselves.

  27

  Golgotha

  OCTOBER

  Someone snuck into the yard one night and hung a crucifix in a crook of the tree. By the time Nathan Lee arrived in next morning, the yard was empty. The damage was done. Izzy stood by the tree.

  “The clones took one look and bolted for the door,” Izzy told him. “Now they won’t come out.”

  Nathan Lee plucked the crucifix from the crook of branches. The little figurine had its arms cast wide. The culprit had been Catholic,
or stolen it from one. Protestants worshipped empty crosses, the transformation not the suffering. “Who would go to the trouble?” He held the thing in his hands. “And why?”

  “Maybe it was meant as a gift,” said Izzy. “Or a token of their Lord’s Prayer, to declare solidarity. Modern Christian to primitive Christian. Probably nothing malicious.”

  His mind had been full of Miranda, her lean body, her green eyes. He didn’t want the interference. He tossed the crucifix into the fire. “Now what?”

  “Let’s just explain it to them,” Izzy wisecracked. “Boys, we’ve made a religion about a corpse nailed on wood.”

  They had discussed it before. Even the primal Christians in the group wouldn’t buy it. The worship of the crucifixion hadn’t evolved for many centuries after the early Church began. The actual practice had needed to end before its adoration could begin.

  “They think it’s an omen of things to come,” said Izzy. “If they had doubts before, they don’t anymore. This is hell. They’re in the hands of demons.”

  The supernatural world was utterly real to them. Nathan Lee had heard it over and over in their testimonies to home. Demons were to blame for everything, for the cold air, for stomach and headaches, for strange noises on the far side of the courtyard walls, for their captivity and the voices on their intercoms, for their bouts of depression and uncontrollable anger. It was not something they could turn on and off.

  There was a theory that consciousness, the idea of self, didn’t develop until two or three thousand years ago. To that point, the human brain hadn’t been wired to distinguish between self and being. The Year Zero clones straddled that psychological divide. For them, or most of them, demons and spirits were everywhere. The Bible talked about go’el, or guardian spirits. Dreams were alternate realities. Their innermost thoughts were the voices of invisible creatures. Back then—a hundred generations ago—people could look at a burning bush and believe they were hearing the voice of God.