by Jeff Long
Nathan Lee fought down his shout at the sky. Who would hear? He set his hands flat on the mounded earth. He lay down. He put his head by the marker. The search was over.
Nathan Lee switched off the voice. He cast one arm over her grave. Later, the helmet could come off. For now, he was just tired. He closed his eyes. All he wanted was to hold his baby.
A GREAT STORM woke him.
Nathan Lee thought he was dreaming. It rocked him with its wind. He opened his eyes, and it was night. The grass and trees were thrashing around him. Dirt and pebbles rattled against his helmet. The crosses shuddered.
A beam of light stabbed down from the sky, blinding him. A figure descended through the radiance. Buffeted by the tempest, the man walked over to him and reached down. A rope led from his chest harness up to the helicopter. Nathan Lee felt a hand groping at his wrist. His radio switched on.
“It’s time to go, Nathan Lee,” a voice spoke in his ears. “Come with me.”
“I’d like to stay,” said Nathan Lee.
“Nah,” the man said. “It’s not your time.”
Nathan Lee felt like he hadn’t slept in many years. “Who are you?”
“I’m your friend. You have lots of friends, Nathan Lee.”
Nathan Lee raised his helmet and peered through the man’s face plate. It was the Captain, his hair silver. “I flew in with you this morning.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“Miranda thought Ochs might try something.”
“Miranda?”
“I came to watch your back.”
“I found my girl,” Nathan Lee announced.
“I know,” said the Captain.
“I’d like to stay for a bit longer.”
“Another time.”
Nathan Lee took his outstretched hand.
Together they were winched into the night.
All the way to Los Alamos, they sat among cages on top of cages filled with human beings who were taped and still. Every one of them was hot with virus. Their eyes glittered in the dark cargo bay.
30
Decon
Decon was more than a place or process, it was a passage between worlds. For fourteen days you were purified here, scrubbed, bled, monitored, and locked down in sterile, solitary cells. It was like a Biblical prescription: anyone who might have been tainted was kept outside the camp for a ritual term.
For the deck raiders, the process was automatic. But researchers from the bio-safety labs were sometimes closed in here, too, especially after accidents. All it took was a needle stick, a rip in your suit, a faulty vent. It was a frightening time. A time of prayers. You didn’t know if your blood might suddenly test positive, in which case you would never re-enter the city again. The term “decon” was a misnomer. In fact, if you were contaminated, you were beyond rescue.
During the first week Nathan Lee’s sole clothing was a pair of tiny goggles for the radiation. They fasted him with juice, electrolytes, and antibiotics for five days. He grew weaker before he could grow stronger. The second week, he was given paper garments, which were burned twice daily.
Nathan Lee kept things tight. They hollowed you out in this place, but not hollow enough. He gave them his body, but not his mind. For the asking, they would have slipped hallucinogenics or sedatives into his IV. Altering reality was a way for the deck sweep troops to survive their dead time.
But Nathan Lee feared losing his tenuous hold. He was glad there were no windows in here, and that the walls were steel, and the corners were squared so precisely. Everything was contained and neat. He took it one second at a time. He glued himself to the moment. He began to fear the end of decon, because it meant entering the world on its own terms again.
It went like that for two weeks. Their doors were locked from the outside, their bodies were poisoned, and they were isolated like serial killers. Over the ceiling intercom, the medical staff apologized for each indignity and pain demanded of him. They thanked him for drawing his own blood and injecting himself with chemicals and bioengineered poisons which were passed to him through an air lock. They were grateful for his sanity, or at least his obedience. Through the walls, he could hear men screaming, and understood that not all the soldiers had returned from the horrors whole.
Through a computer console built into the wall, he had access to e-books, movies, video games, even skin flicks. Instead he did his Buddha thing, empty mind, empty heart. When bursts of energy overcame him, he did pushups. The rest of the time, he lay still. He felt suspended in light.
A physician started up a running dialog over the wall speaker. He knew who Nathan Lee was, but didn’t offer his name. He said he was Nathan Lee’s designated psychiatrist, though Nathan Lee already had one during the daytime. Double-teaming him, Nathan Lee decided. They monitored more than your physical health in here. The man’s voice came like talk radio, usually deep in the night.
He told Nathan Lee about the weather, his favorite books, and other things. He asked about Denver. He was fascinated by the destruction.
“Do you have a family?” asked Nathan Lee.
“Why do you ask?”
“You should take them far away. To the mountains or the desert,” said Nathan Lee. “Now.”
“Really?” the psychiatrist said. “What about E-Day?” Evacuation Day. It was everybody’s idea of salvation, holing up in the salt dome.
“Have they finally announced a date?”
“It got pushed back,” said the psychiatrist. “Extenuating circumstances.”
“What happened?”
“The excavators hit a water pocket. It wasn’t supposed to be there. Water and salt, not a good combination. They almost lost the whole place.” He sounded almost upbeat. “As it is, the two lowest levels melted out. They’re pumping out the water, slaving to save the rest.”
“People must be panicked.”
“No one knows.”
“You do,” said Nathan Lee.
“Secrets are my business.”
“Now what?”
“We wait, I suppose. There’s always the Sera-III. The silver bullet.”
Another secret. “I don’t know what that is,” said Nathan Lee.
“Miranda hasn’t told you?”
Nathan Lee frowned. Who was this man? “What about Miranda?”
“She’s been at work on it for months. Clone blood, essentially. Sera loaded with antibodies.”
“Miranda’s found the cure?”
“No. The antibodies only work for three years. That’s the three in Sera-III. It’s not really a silver bullet. More like slow suicide. You have to infect yourself in order to be saved. And then you’re not saved anyway. Three years down the road, the Grim Reaper is still waiting.”
“So the sanctuary chambers are flooded, and there is no cure. You sound fine with that,” said Nathan Lee.
“I wonder about just desserts, is all,” the voice said.
“You think we deserve to die?”
“We take so much for granted,” the psychiatrist answered. “The question is do we deserve to live?”
Another time, they talked about the pilgrims. The little gathering of locals that Nathan Lee had seen along the Rio Grande had been dispersed. The military had dropped leaflets warning them to go back to their homes, and afterwards killed the valley floor with Agent Orange. “But they’re coming back,” said the physician. “It’s different this time. They’re starting to show up from faraway. People are afraid of them.”
“Why, are they dangerous?”
“We don’t know.”
“Who are they?”
“The last Americans. A lot of them have guns.”
“Everyone has guns.” Nathan Lee had seen it on his way across the country. It was little more than gang warfare out there. “They’ll use them on each other. They’re fragmented.”
“Not anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“Have you ever looked up the word ‘apocalypse’?” the physician riffed.
“So many people think it’s just another way of saying total destruction.”
Nathan Lee let him ramble.
“In fact there’s a whole philosophy behind it, the idea of a chosen people having special knowledge and being spared the cosmic end. The righteous will live happily ever after here on earth.”
“Yes,” said Nathan Lee. “The kingdom movement.” Where was the man going with this?
“It’s very appealing. Very American. Egalitarian. Inclusive. Revolutionary. Just the sort of thing to bring the ragtag barbarians together.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This Jesus thing of yours.”
Nathan Lee sat up. His scalp prickled. Suddenly he realized these midnight visits had not been random. The physician had been insinuating himself into Nathan Lee’s head. He was here for a reason. “Of mine?”
“Please,” said the physician. “You unleashed it. Without him, they’d still just be scattered across the wilds. Now they’ve found a center.”
“Do you mean the clone?” That was still going on?
“Yes.”
“But he’s not Jesus Christ.”
“He is now.”
“That’s crazy. He’s a counterfeit.”
“Tell him that.”
“I did. I tried.” What had been going on in his absence?
“I thought you might try to disown him.”
“He’s not mine,” said Nathan Lee.
“But you helped create him. The clones were speechless animals, at least most of them,” said the physician. “You gave them a voice. You built them a stage. I never imagined anyone would go so far for them.”
“They’re harmless. The messiah is somebody’s idea of a practical joke.”
“The city was so safe, just one more spot on the map,” said the physician. “Everything was fine. But now the mob is coming.” And yet he didn’t sound resentful.
“The soldiers will protect us.” Nathan Lee felt trapped. He was at the man’s mercy, locked in here. What did he want with him?
“What if it’s too late?” The question was rhetorical, not bitter.
“Who are you?” Nathan Lee demanded.
“I just wanted to say thank you, Nathan Lee.”
“For what?”
“For doing your part.”
“My part of what?”
“As you put it, the joke,” said the voice.
The voice departed. Nathan Lee called to the ceiling speaker for the man to come back, but there was only silence. He hammered at his door, and the staff ignored him.
Next morning, when a nurse spoke to him over the intercom, Nathan Lee demanded to know who the physician was that had been talking to him each night. She checked their records, and there was no such physician, no nighttime psychiatrists, no midnight calls. By her tone of voice, Nathan Lee could tell she thought he was imagining things. A lot of their patients did that.
ON THE EVE of his release, Miranda was allowed to place a call. You were supposed to be incommunicado in here. The stated reason was that decon was a period of debriefing. Contact with family and friends might contaminate your information. In fact, Nathan Lee suspected, the authorities feared letting people see their loved ones so raw and wild. Tucked away in decon, the psychiatrists had time to tame you.
Nathan Lee’s computer screen flickered to life and Miranda’s face appeared on the wall. The camera softened her cheeks. She looked different, even healthy. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Your two weeks are almost up,” she announced brightly.
He sat up, dull and heavy. His eyes hurt from the reflected light on the stainless steel walls. He was sick from dreaming too much. “Miranda,” he said.
“Is that tan for real? You look like a gigolo.”
She was calling from her kitchen computer. It was late afternoon. He could tell by the long shadows. She was eating toast, trying to appear casual, as if this were just another call on her list.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I heard about your daughter,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He felt stupid with inertia. “What’s going on out there? I heard about the pilgrims.”
“Yes. Poor people.”
Nathan Lee didn’t pursue it. “You shouldn’t have sent the Captain after me,” he said.
“Don’t blame me,” she said. “I never would have done that to him. He sent himself. He had his reasons. His own, you know, loss.”
Nathan Lee fell silent.
“It was a grand try,” Miranda said. “Doomed. But grand.”
Nathan Lee looked away from the screen. He didn’t want grand; he wanted ordinary. He didn’t want hardships; he wanted a soft bed and a hot shower. People lauded his adventures as plunges into his soul, never realizing he was in an almost constant state of escape from his own missteps and unworthiness. All his life he had felt…starved.
“Ochs is gone,” she said. “In case you were wondering.” She seemed to lean closer, watching for a reaction.
Ochs. “What did you do with him?”
“Not me,” she said. “My father. He’s here.”
“He came up from the sanctuary?”
“He flew in by helicopter. He had business to attend. Loose ends.”
There was so much to talk about. Suddenly Nathan Lee could not wait to be out of this place. “Where did Ochs go?” he asked.
“Out. Down from the Hill. He left before he could be deported. The perimeter cameras showed him walking across the bridge over the river. No one knows where he went.” She hesitated. “Are you going after him?”
He was not. Ochs was dead to him. There were a dozen different ways to state that. Nathan Lee chose carefully. “And lose you?” he said.
It was the right answer. Her lips opened, but she said nothing.
“We need to talk,” he said. His nightmares of the sea had come back. He kept dreaming of the children and letting go of the ship, cutting loose from the lost ones. But what if he had saved them?
She leaned into the camera. Her face distorted on his screen. “Not now,” she said. She smiled. “I’ll tell you more, later. Be ready,” she warned him. “That’s why I called. Heads up. My father wants to meet you.”
“Me?”
“He said it’s important.”
It came to him, her fleshed-out face, the green eyes no longer so sunken. “You’re pregnant,” he blurted out.
For a moment he was overjoyed.
She looked jolted. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“I just thought, your father, us…” He stopped, embarrassed. It had become pathetic, his groping for a family of his own. He remembered Miranda’s words from what seemed a lifetime ago, that bringing a child into the world would be a cruelty. “I was wrong,” he said.
“Go to sleep, Nathan Lee.” The screen went blank.
That night he dreamed about the Russian ship again, the faces bobbing in the dark water.
NEXT MORNING, dressed in clean jumpsuits, he and Captain Enote were taken to the gates of South Sector and processed out. A humvee waited on the far side of the wire. The world looked fresh and unspoiled out there. The morning air was so crisp it was like snapping your fingers.
The Captain took deep draughts of the air. His face was copper from the UVs, but he had lost weight in decon. He looked gaunt and very old this morning, and Nathan Lee felt ashamed, as if it were his fault the man had gone through so much suffering. “Thanks,” he said. He kept it unadorned. “Are you okay?”
The Captain nodded once. “It was a bad place. But good for thinking,” he said. “Now things are very clear to me.” He didn’t elaborate.
The driver had been instructed to deliver Nathan Lee first. “Dr. Abbot is waiting for you.”
“He can wait a little more,” said Nathan Lee. He made the driver first take the Captain to his little house above the town. It was set among the pines, and Nathan Lee saw a treehouse made of scrap wood. That was for Tara. The Captain got
out stiffly. Nathan Lee stayed in the deeper recesses of the hummer. He didn’t want Tara to see him, not this morning when he would only leave her too soon.
The Captain faced his home. He didn’t have an ounce of luggage. “We’ll see you later,” he said.
Near the tip of the mesa finger they came to Miranda’s house. Nathan Lee approached the front door. He could still taste the toothpaste from South Sector. After all the decon, he’d probably never smelled so clean in his life.
Miranda opened the door before he could knock. She was taller than he remembered. He felt frail and self conscious. He half-expected a plague kiss, which had become the fashion in Los Alamos, a darting of cheek toward cheek, lips pursed, no contact. She kissed him on the mouth and hugged him tight enough to feel her heart drumming in her ribs. “You’re back,” she whispered.
Her father was in the kitchen, one cellphone to his ear, another in his opposite hand. His hair was thick and black, combed straight back from his high forehead. He was dressed sharply, ready for prime time, issuing a command. He measured Nathan Lee from the corner of his eye. Nathan Lee saw Miranda’s height and strong jaw in Paul Abbot, and her long, columnar neck.
“You need to eat,” Miranda said to Nathan Lee. She poured a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator, and he took his time with it, savoring the coldness and sweet taste.
Everything seemed so delicate. And deep. The mountains looked a million miles away. His focus had dwindled to a few feet away within the cell.
“Sit,” she commanded. She was nervous, which brought the dictator out in her. “Or stand.”
“I’m fine, Miranda.”
Her father held up a one-minute finger.
Glancing around, Nathan Lee saw Miranda’s defiance to her father. It was in the details. She had left dirty dishes stacked in the sink, which was not like her, and books piled on the counter. Also, she had brought Nathan Lee’s Matisse statue from the bedroom. The little nude was conspicuous in a beam of sunlight. The jade glowed with inner light, all curves and hips and attitude.
Then he saw a cube of clear plastic, three inches square, on the kitchen table. Suspended in its center was what looked like a morphine ampule, the type combat soldiers stabbed into wounded comrades. He’d seen enough of them on his passage through America to know that this one didn’t contain morphine, though. The liquid was wheat-colored, like the sera Miranda had showed him in the storage freezers. It was easy to infer this was what his midnight visitor had described, the Sera-III.