Year Zero

by Jeff Long

  Izzy translated the question, and Eesho responded in the affirmative, one more rote recitation of the loaves and fishes and healing the blind and crippled. Ochs appeared pleased, even inspired.

  “Talitha, cuma,” Ochs said. That seemed to be the extent of his Aramaic. Nathan Lee recognized it, straight from scripture. He knew the place, he knew the miracle. It meant Little girl, arise. Ochs was tossing it out there to see if he got a bite.

  Eesho looked at him with increasing ascendancy. “I spoke those words,” he said, “and the child woke up.”

  “And Lazarus?” said Ochs.

  Eesho gave a spare rendition of raising that corpse, too.

  Nathan Lee knew where Ochs was heading. The context was all important. Chronologically, just a day earlier in Denver, Nathan Lee had refused to dig up Lydia and Grace. Now Ochs was about to ask the clone to do the job Nathan Lee wouldn’t.

  “You claim to be able to raise the dead,” Ochs reiterated.

  A minute later, Izzy gave the response. “He wants to know if you’re asking him for a miracle.”

  Ochs said yes.

  Izzy protested. “This is getting out of hand.”

  “Does he have the power to raise the dead? Ask him,” said Ochs.

  Izzy grudgingly asked, and gave the reply. “If anyone tells you, ‘Look here is Christ!’ don’t believe it. Because false christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and miracles to deceive you.” Mark was it, or Luke? Nathan Lee couldn’t remember anymore.

  Ochs grew very still. His eyes grew brighter. Nathan Lee was confused. Eesho was, of course, refusing to perform a miracle…because he couldn’t. But Ochs looked thrilled to be denied.

  “What about the plague?” asked Ochs. “Ask him if he can lift its curse from us.”

  “You ask me to undo God’s judgment,” Eesho responded. “If I say no, then what? Will you condemn God so that you can be justified?”

  “What about mercy?” Ochs asked.

  “God causes everything on the face of the whole earth to happen,” said Eesho. “Do you understand? You must prepare yourself like a man. Repent in dust and ashes.” Back to the Old Testament. Job. The man was like a grasshopper, bounding from one text to another.

  No sooner had Izzy finished translating than Ochs leapt to his feet. His round face took on a fixed, eerie look.

  “Now here it comes,” Izzy muttered to Nathan Lee.

  Ochs walked around the table. The clone got up from his chair and backed against the wall. Ochs towered above him, a good foot taller and twice his weight. “Scared him silly,” remarked Izzy. “Eesho thought he was about to get the royal thrashing. Thought he’d stiffed the wrong man.”

  For a moment, Nathan Lee thought the same thing. Eesho had just given Ochs the high hat. “Back off, there,” Izzy told Ochs.

  Instead, abruptly, Ochs dropped to his knees at the clone’s feet. His jowls shook. His tree trunk arms raised up.

  “What are you doing?” Izzy objected on tape. “Get to your feet, man. You’ll twist him.”

  “It was like he’d been waiting to kneel all his life,” Izzy commented to Nathan Lee.

  “Forgive us,” said Ochs.

  Eesho looked down at Ochs. It was hard to tell who was converting who. In the span of an instant, Eesho’s alarm changed to disbelief. He looked like a man who’d just won the New Jersey lotto.

  “I hear your words,” Eesho replied, “but not your heart.”

  With that the clone placed his hand on Ochs’s bald head, then shoved him away. Ochs fell to one side. He began to weep with joy, or release.

  It was, Nathan Lee realized, a moment of perfect unison. It was like watching the virus find its host. Which was the virus, and which was the host, Nathan Lee couldn’t say.

  HALLOWEEN CAME. The streets filled with monsters who were hideous and princesses who were beautiful. The pumpkins were fat and orange. The moon was striped with clouds.

  Tara went as Madeline dressed in blue, her bangs cut square, her muscled frame square, too. Nathan Lee and Miranda trailed her in the dusk, holding hands. Tara didn’t seem to notice that she was trick-or-treating by herself. If she heard the distant children whispering about her, she didn’t pay attention. She was too busy counting her harvest, flashing her light in the bag after each house. Back at the Captain’s house, while they drank hot cider and ate pumpkin pie, she counted every piece of candy, then started over again at one hundred.

  “I’ve never seen a Halloween like this,” said the Captain. “Look at all that loot.”

  “That means the people loved Madeline,” his wife declared.

  Down on the floor with her candy, Tara smiled broadly.

  Ever since Tara had moved in with them, the Captain and his wife had grown younger. The framed pictures of their own daughter—dressed for prom, on a river rafting trip, holding a fish, standing beside a Navy jet in her flight suit—had been crowded out by Tara’s artwork. Tara filled their quiet with songs. There was life in the house again.

  “…eight, nine, ten….” Tara was dividing her bounty between five dolls, who sat side by side along the wall. She kept sneaking looks at Nathan Lee. Miranda nudged him with mock jealousy.

  Nathan Lee was happy tonight, and also sad. He didn’t say what he was thinking, that Los Alamos was starting to face up to its end. This was the best Halloween ever, but for a reason. The great pretending had begun. He’d seen it last summer in towns across America, the grownups beguiling their children, making believe the good times had no end.

  * * *

  NOVEMBER UNFOLDED. Since the halt to trucking in August, the citizens had grown steadily shabbier, their sleeves and collars more frayed and greasy by the day. Stores displayed more empty shelves. European-style kiosks sold old Newsweek and The Observer and Scientific American magazines. Yellowed copies of the New York Times dated back to the 1990s. Used bookstores flourished.

  It was basketball season. Every Friday night the stands were packed as Los Alamos’s two high schools vied in lively, if redundant, competition. The city continued to swim in electricity thanks to their nuclear reactor plant. Street and porch lights stayed on all night.

  It was as if the city were floating in air.

  Then one morning, they woke to find themselves besieged.

  Overnight, the few hundred pilgrims along the Rio Grande swelled to twenty thousand. A day later, they were thirty thousand. The citizens of Los Alamos were appalled. These were plague victims at their doorstep. Cavendish helpfully declared this was the beginning of the end.

  Curiously, the generals did nothing. Even more curiously, their restraint calmed the city. It seemed to enunciate their power. Remembering that the pilgrims had been dispersed once before, people decided they could be dispersed again. For now, so long as the horde stayed on its own side of the river, they were left alone.

  These new pilgrims coiled down through the wine country by the thousands, through old villages where santoses were still carved from the heart of cottonwoods and the cemeteries dated back to Spanish colonial times. They streamed in from the deserts of Texas and Mexico, and south from mountain fortresses bunkered upon ski mountains and in extinct gold mines in Colorado and Utah, and out from tornado shelters and missile silos and train tunnels. Wherever they had been hiding, they emerged. Slouching toward the city of light.

  Remote surveillance cameras watched them day and night. It helped ease the city’s anxiety that the vagabond camp resembled old, fabled hippie communes, right down to their guitars, soup lines, and agape. They showed no inclination to violence. To the contrary, they signaled their desire for peace. They knew they were being watched. Some had relatives within Los Alamos. They held up signs to the cameras across the river with people’s names, or with peace signs, or with references to scripture.

  The Rio was their Jordan. They pitched their tents on soil painted orange with Vietnam-era poison. They were explicit about their intent to remain along the river banks. They wanted a miracle, not bloodshe
d.

  It was a plague camp down there. Satellite photos showed a great red tumor along the eastern banks of the river. The plasma rods for detecting decomposition gases read off the scale. Downstream, the Rio ran hot with virus.

  By Thanksgiving, their camp was two miles long and growing. Military intelligence estimated their numbers at nearly a hundred thousand. In another week, they would be double that. The high-altitude photos taken at night were most telling. You could see their candles and fires reaching backwards in long thick veins that forked and thinned and forked again and became capillaries and finally just dots of light at their distant origins. They were the last of their kind. America was coming to celebrate Christmas.

  As the days passed by, the pilgrims asked for nothing. At night, their campfires turned the valley red. The pilgrims who arrived healthy were quickly infected. They didn’t seem to mind. Christ had arisen at Los Alamos.

  Miranda convoked an emergency session with the generals and lab directors.

  “We should have evacuated while it was still possible,” cried a scientist.

  “The time is not right,” a general responded.

  “What are you waiting for?” an administrator demanded. “They’ll outnumber us two to one in a week.”

  “Four to one in two weeks,” someone added. “How are we supposed to do our work with people dying down there?”

  “We’re monitoring the situation,” the general told them. The generals sat side by side, hands folded, inscrutable. They were serene. Nathan Lee was perplexed. They didn’t seem to care.

  “They could come storming up here any minute. You’re supposed to be protecting us.”

  “The situation is under control,” the general said.

  “They’re a clear and present danger,” someone protested.

  A minister from one of the local churches tapped on his microphone. He was an older man with a cloud of white hair and highlander sideburns. He leaned forward. “They are the lilies of the field,” he said.

  People waited impatiently.

  “They’re hungry and thirsty,” the minister continued. “Christians in need.”

  “They’re carriers,” a woman barked at him. “They’re already dead. We have to break them up before it’s too late. How will we ever be able to evacuate with them blocking the highway?”

  The generals looked like a row of Buddhas, not a worry. “When the time comes,” one said, “we will part the waters.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The general smiled. “Just Bible talk.” He offered no other explanations.

  “Feed them,” the minister argued. “We have plenty. Give them the bread of life.”

  “And encourage more to come?” someone said.

  “They come in peace,” said the minister. He sounded like an old movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

  “They may have come in peace,” a woman said, “but they’ll never leave that way. They’ve come too far with nothing to lose. They have nowhere to return to. They’re contaminating each other. They’re never going home. They’ve got Los Alamos in their sights.”

  “Show them mercy,” said the minister, “and they will do the same.”

  They heckled him. “You’re out of your tree, reverend.”

  Miranda intervened. She looked at the generals. “What do you recommend?”

  The generals put their hands over their microphones and spoke among themselves. They nodded their heads. Finally one general spoke. “We’re better off knowing where they are than trying to figure out where they’re hiding. Let them come. All of them. As long as they don’t cross the river, we’re safe.”

  “You’re not going to do anything?” a molecular engineer complained. “Strafe them.” People booed his suggestion. “I mean along the edges,” he qualified. “Drop a few bombs on our side of the valley. Shake them up. Back them off.”

  “We’re not in the business of bluffing,” said the general.

  “But we have to do something.”

  “We will watch and wait. And feed them,” said the general.

  “What!”

  The minister closed his eyes in thanksgiving.

  “The reverend has a good idea. It works in our favor,” the general continued. “Give them food and supplies. Keep them in place.”

  “You sound like peaceniks out of Santa Fe,” said a lab chief. “Love and charity. They’re an army gathering down there. I’ve seen guns and rogue soldiers on the remote cams. Every day they’re getting stronger.”

  The general hunched upon the table and his shoulders were like wings. “Everyday they get weaker,” he clarified. “If they sit there long enough, they’ll die off by themselves.”

  They considered that. Their charity would be their weapon. It satisfied them. Deeply.

  And so they began to feed their enemy.

  32

  Penitentes

  DECEMBER

  It was that time of year when little girls and boys became sugar plum fairies and mice. The Bolshoi’s second annual presentation of The Nutcracker was right around the corner. The remnants of the Denver symphony dug up its Tchaikovsky. A famous Broadway producer who had taken shelter here warred with a famous Hollywood producer over the staging, lights, and credit.

  Wreaths of evergreen boughs appeared. The trees in the park sprouted red bows and Styrofoam candycanes. Thousands of farolitos lined the walkways, paper bags weighted with sand and each holding a candle. Nathan Lee didn’t think there could be so many candles left in all of Los Alamos. Like the children at school, Tara learned about Hanukah and dreidels, Kwanzaa, the baby Jesus in a manger, and Santa. She was kept at home, of course, a shy girl still given to dark outbursts. Thanks to the Captain’s old record collection, she was crooning carols from Perry Como.

  Researchers showed up for work with pink cheeks and thick sweaters. The microwaves smelled like apple cider. In lieu of mistletoe, a few red chilies hung over office doors. Out came the beakers of home-brew lovingly distilled in lab glassware. Everyone was determined not to have the holiday spoiled.

  And yet the invaders were there.

  In the space of a few weeks, the plague camp along the Rio had grown to epic proportions. Earlier military estimates were off by magnitudes of ten. There were nearly a million people down there, with more on the way, America’s last spasm of colonial movement, bony and wind-chapped, squatting on the edge of Oz. From the air, they looked like a great migratory herd of animals. Or Woodstock.

  The city resented their siege. Weren’t the scientists working night and day to find a cure for them? Didn’t the people of Los Alamos deserve their own Christmas, one free of the primal Christ lurking in those fevered imaginations below? They were like ancestors muttering down there. Ancestors with knives. It wasn’t right.

  The pilgrims’ religious fervor was stark and frightening. Surveillance cameras mounted west of the river showed a city of patched North Face tents, rusting lean-tos made of corrugated metal, cardboard shanties, stones piled as windbreaks, and hollows clawed into the earth, dung everywhere. It reminded Nathan Lee of Everest base camp near the end of a climbing season, the wild hair, the glittering eyes. Nighttime temperatures dipped into the teens. People slept beneath windshields pulled from abandoned cars. They slept in the open, some of them all but naked. Trapped by the valley walls and a ceiling of cold air, their wood smoke clung overhead in a layer of brown smog. The hills were denuded of wood and brush from Taos all the way south to Santa Fe. The towns themselves looked gnawed to the ground by giant termites. Anything wood was carted into the maw of the camp and used for fuel.

  They were cold. If a thing could be burned for heat, they burned it. There was one exception, their crosses. The pilgrims had erected a mile-long row of them along their side of the Rio Grande. Big and sturdy, the crosses were made of pine and they faced Los Alamos.

  The river was just a wide stream at this time of the year. Crossing over would have been easy. And yet, for some reason, the un
welcome visitors stayed on the eastern banks. Los Alamos took comfort in that self-restraint. Some sort of executive intelligence had to be at work in the massive camp, it was a matter of deductive reasoning. The pilgrims were policing themselves, feeding themselves, tending to their needs, distributing the shipments of food. Above all, they were holding to the unspoken border. That meant they had to have a leader—or leaders—who understood the notion of sovereignty.

  And yet they couldn’t seem to locate the pilgrims’ leader, not from a distance with their cameras. Los Alamos’s intelligence department pored over aerial images, but there was no defined center to the mob, no hub to the reeling mass of people. For whatever reason, the leader chose to remain concealed and unnamed, operating out of sight, a mystery. They went on searching. If only he would present himself, the city would gladly—eagerly—formalize their coexistence. They would offer to increase the humanitarian food shipments. In return, the leaders of the siege would surely agree to a treaty recognizing the river border and cementing the peace.

  Nathan Lee thought differently. He looked at that long row of crosses made of wood, wood that could have been burned by freezing people, but was not. He saw a horde led by an idea, not leaders. He doubted anyone spoke for them. They were kept in check, not by reason, but by a shared emotion. They were a pool of raw fuel waiting to be lit.

  And still the generals did nothing.

  ON DECEMBER 14, the remote cams carried a savage new picture of the camp. Overnight a dozen of the riverside crosses had come to bear living men. The men shifted in pain on the crosses, their arms roped to the cross beams, some in ragged Fruit of the Looms, others naked.

  The emergency council was stunned. The esteemed Baptist minister with his bushy white sideburns was speechless.

  “Are they criminals?” someone asked. “It must be. They’re being punished for breaking the law. They have laws. They have punishment. That’s good.”

  Nathan Lee got closer to the TV and saw little platforms for the crucified to stand on. “They’re penitentes,” he told them.