by Jeff Long
It took another few minutes to spot what they’d missed. Nathan Lee knew what to look for. He knew Ochs. The professor was chain-reacting. Nathan Lee kept staring at the screen.
“There,” he said. The clue to their fate was in plain sight.
The camera wasn’t randomly positioned. Using a remote control, one of the technicians slowly zoomed the lens. The crosses drew nearer. Smoke fouled the long distance, but then the sun broke through. The crosses lit up.
They were empty, except for one. A man was trying to get comfortable up there. It was a delicate task. He was in such pain. There were no rope straps to slip his arms and feet into. This was no penitente. They had nailed him to the wood.
“Izzy,” said Nathan Lee.
The room fell silent. They stared at the awful, miniature spectacle. A woman began weeping. The minister with white hair crossed himself.
“Animals,” hissed a cell biologist from Miranda’s lab.
“Ochs,” said a man.
The FBI negotiator was perplexed. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is he making way for the messiah, or does he think he is the messiah? He’s playing out the crucifixion. But he’s not the one being crucified. By punishing the other, he transfers the messiah’s power to his victim. Is that it? A self-loathing Christian…but….” Her muttering tapered off.
“They’ll be coming soon,” said Nathan Lee. “Here.”
“Soon?” asked the cell biologist. “When is soon? How would you know?”
“History,” said Nathan Lee. “Ochs is a slave to the classics.”
“Classics,” rumbled a general. “What does that tell us?”
“Plutarch’s account of Spartacus,” said Nathan Lee. “Spartacus had an enemy soldier crucified in the middle of his camp for all his followers to see. He kept the man alive for a week.”
“Superficial parallels,” said the FBI negotiator. She was struggling with this. “The Spartacus tale speaks to Ochs’s motivation, not his timing. This is an act of terrorism, plain and simple. It tells us nothing about when they might attack the city.”
“But Spartacus didn’t use the crucifixion to terrorize his enemies,” said Nathan Lee. “I don’t think Ochs is, either. It’s for his followers, not for us.”
Everyone was listening. He went on. “Seasoning,” he said. “Ochs’s word. Spartacus used the execution to prepare his army. For a week, they lived with the message. Out of suffering they were born, through suffering they would be freed.”
“I still don’t see….”
“Spartacus waited for the prisoner to die,” finished Nathan Lee. “And then his army was ready.”
For a moment every eye fixed on the figure of Izzy. He looked so small up there against the sky. So mortal. Like a tiny island.
“COME WITH ME,” Nathan Lee said.
It was nearly midnight. There was nothing more they could do. The crucifixion had been turned over to medical experts who were guessing about Izzy’s endurance, to optics wonks trying to boost the low-lux video image, to meteorologists warning of a cold front, and to the satellite people laboring to pinpoint his individual thermal signature among the million others. Suddenly Izzy’s existence had become a matter of life and death.
Miranda followed him from the council room and out into the night. She was too agitated to go home. Nathan Lee doubted many people were sleeping this night. They walked to Alpha Lab, crossing the bridge beneath a dome of frozen constellations. There was no moon, only the glitter of pitiless stars. At least there was no wind. Izzy was naked. Nathan Lee could not get over it.
They walked quickly through the cold. Inside, the building was warm. They took the elevator down to her office. A mattress was leaning up against one wall for her all-nighters. Miranda collapsed in a chair.
Nathan Lee stood by the window overlooking the incubation capsules. The chamber glowed blue. Tropical humidity beaded the far side of the glass. He pressed one fingertip against the window. It felt like he was forever on the outside looking in at one world or another, never quite sure if here was there.
“Miranda,” he said. It was time. “We have to leave.”
He saw her reflection in the glass. She didn’t stir in her chair. He turned and went over and took her cold hands. Her eyes looked hollowed out.
“I can get us out of here,” he said. “We’ll go over the mountain. While there’s still time.”
Unexpectedly, she smiled. “Paris?” she said.
“Somewhere.”
She touched his face. “And then what?”
All through the evening he had watched men and women coming to terms with the looming invasion. As one, the generals had stood and left the room to plot their own strategem. The rest had stayed and pondered their options, emptying out their hopes, blame, and wild ideas. Finally they had exhausted themselves. Through it all, Miranda had presided over their confusion. They were trapped upon their mesa. The only question was how long Izzy might last and when the end would come.
“Three years,” he said to her. “The Sera-III. Give us that gift, you and me.”
Her smile faded. “We’ve been through this. Without the city, there is no hope. Everything is here.”
“It’s too late, Miranda. Your father was too late with his kingdom of tunnels. You’re too late with your magic. The plague has caught up with us. Think of us.”
“I am,” she said.
“Then quit trying to save the world.”
“Quit?” She was tender. “We can’t quit. You taught me that. Never quit.”
“It’s over,” he said.
“No.” But she wasn’t being stubborn. The smile returned. A secret smile. “It’s practically within our grasp.”
“You’re dreaming.” He let go of her hands.
“Yes, I’m dreaming.”
“What? What do you dream about?” He gestured at the lab works below. “Glassware and tubes?”
“Jungles,” she said quietly. “Searching for children, looking in jungles. Calling their names. And finding them. They come out from the trees.”
“Then we’ll go to the jungles. We can’t stay.”
“I have to stay.”
“Stop it,” he shouted. He was startled. They had never argued.
After a minute, she said, “Go.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then she said it again. “You should go.”
“Not without you.”
“I have no choice,” she said. “Believe me.”
“But you do,” he said.
She closed her eyes and then opened them, green eyes. “Do you remember that time I called you in decon?” she said. “You thought I was pregnant.”
“I wanted you to be pregnant,” he said.
“And do you remember how surprised I was?” she asked.
“You said, no way….”
“I said, why would you say a thing like that?”
A long minute passed.
“I still don’t know how you knew,” she softly finished. She took his hand and placed it on her stomach. She sounded awestruck. “I’m like clockwork. I never miss. So I took the test. She’s eleven weeks now. It may have happened our very first time. That time in the woods.”
He was stunned. His whole reality shifted. The ground felt slippery. He tried to be angry. Bring a child into this world? But her face stopped him. She was radiant, feverish with light, inside and out.
“You have wanted to leave so badly,” she said. “I don’t want anything to hold you.”
“But I didn’t know,” he protested.
“Now you do.”
And suddenly, in that instant, he did know. He looked at her hands on top of his hands.
“You can still leave.” Her voice was small.
“Miranda,” he said, “I will never leave you.”
34
Lost Souls
7:30 A.M.
He left her sleeping. Now, as he descended Highway 502, the wreckage and smoke were like somethin
g out of Heironymus Bosch, medieval and sulphurous and weird. The Appaloosa despised it. She kept balking. Nathan Lee kept nudging her on. Here and there across the river, pilgrims had dragged big, oily telephone poles into huge bonfires. Even the flames looked rancid.
The row of crosses along the far banks of the Rio were stark and untidy, tilting at crazy angles, like the masts on a sinking ship. From this distance they appeared empty. The penitentes had given up their perches. Maybe people had tired of their theater and pretence. Blood is not always blood. Some is more real.
Drawing closer to the bridge, he remembered every detail of his slow passage up this highway. Partly it was the pace, horseback and gradual. He passed the same mile marker that once designated the tree holding his saddlebags from the Smithsonian, and there was the tree. Yet everything was changed. The tree was nothing but dead branches, killed by defoliant. As far as his eyes could see, the rolling valley floor was painted absurdly bright orange. He remembered the fine July light, and that was gone. He remembered his high hopes, and they were gone, too. Not gone, really, but changed. Refined, at best. Mutated, definitely. It frightened him. He didn’t understand what he was doing down here. His idea was so muddy and half finished, so perilous, that it couldn’t even be called an idea. A vision, something like that. But what if he was wrong? He tried to put Miranda out of mind. He had promised her, and now…this.
The stench of camp reached out from a mile off. The Appaloosa snorted. Her breath smoked in the cold. She pulled at the reins. Nathan Lee kept her in motion with a few gentle words. “I know,” he said. He stroked her dappled neck. Her muscles trembled.
Closer still, they passed through a gauntlet of shot-up cars and trucks and troop carriers littering the roadside. Some stuck nose-first in the gullies. Many had rolled violently, thrown by land mines, mangled by rocket fire. Windshields were spiderwebbed from bullet holes. Bodies in white or orange or blue or green moon suits lay where snipers had dropped them. Only now did Nathan Lee see that the battle for Los Alamos had been going on for weeks, a low grade skirmishing in this noman’s-land. The generals had not breathed a word of it. The city had been in more danger than the citizens knew.
Now he saw the abandoned trenches. Right and left, ugly dirt roads threaded off to hunched, mounded fire bases facing the siege camp. They looked menacing, but were empty. Over the last few days, it was now plain, the generals had withdrawn their army. Nathan Lee hadn’t seen a soldier for miles, not since leaving the city’s fences before dawn.
The bridge lay a quarter-mile ahead. Thick flocks of birds hung above camp. Dark shapes gathered along the water’s edge, watching him. High atop his horse, towering above the roadside debris, Nathan Lee felt like he was hanging in midair.
A humvee’s headlight suddenly shattered at his side. The Appaloosa sheered left, and Nathan Lee had to fight to steady her. Then someone stitched the metal fender with another dozen warning shots. The rounds didn’t punch neat, little perforations. They passed laterally along the metal skin, ripping the fender with long knifing gashes.
Nathan Lee saw, but did not hear, the sparkle of muzzle flash in the distance. He willed his heart to slow down, but it wouldn’t. He felt dizzy. Crazy. It’s not too late, a voice whispered. He could take cover among the wrecks, wait for night, climb the highway. Go home. They might still let him back inside. Run him through decon. Restore him to life. That was his temptation. Yet another.
But they would refuse him at the gate. He knew the rules of engagement. He wasn’t wearing a moon suit. He’d never make it close to the city again. They would drop him with a bullet at five hundred yards. Descending without the suit had been a conscious choice, just like his decision not to infect himself with the Sera-III. Both would have given him degrees of protection from the virus, but both would have killed him sooner or later. Plainly the pilgrims shot the suits on sight. As for the Sera-III, it might have given him a three-year window, but he couldn’t be sure he’d survive the next few minutes, much less years. More to the point, he couldn’t afford the forty-eight hours it would have taken for his immune system to ramp up the antibodies. Besides, his courage would never have held so long. Forty-eight hours is a long time to hold the razor above your own wrist.
The suit and the Sera-III were false choices anyway. With or without them, he was entering the land of the dead. That had been the real choice, to stay in safety or descend into the valley, and even there the choice was nil. Because to stay meant praying for Ochs, or the generals, to show mercy, and mercy was no longer an operative term. It wasn’t that they were inherently evil men. Of late, Nathan Lee had given up on monsters. He’d never believed in God. Now, far worse, he didn’t believe in Satan. The devil made a fine scapegoat, but the Great Deceiver was a deception, just one more try at stuffing the universe into a shoe box. Human scale might be good for measuring doorways, but it was useless for answering misery. In the end, mankind’s downfall wasn’t manmade, nor written in heaven or cooked up in hell, just a crooked bit of protein.
And so he approached the pilgrim camp with no defenses, no explanations, no ticket home, only a headful of voices. He was terrified. And lonely. Even in the middle of Tibet he’d never felt so single-handed and alone. Nathan Lee knew what he had to do, but didn’t know why. He was making it up as he went along, writing himself into—or out of—his own movie. As he rode toward the bridge, it felt like he was plunging into a dark shaft. Winging it…on broken wings.
The Appaloosa carried him a hundred yards more, shying, then obeying. Her eyes rolled at the smell of meat rotting. He could have forced her on. He craved the strength of her big muscles and the warmth coming up from her body. Nathan Lee was unsure his own legs would carry him.
But she was so beautiful. He ran his eyes along her perfect neck, the columns of muscle, the rippling shoulders. He sighted down between her ears twitching at the distance. She dreamed dreams in that great skull.
At last he pulled the reins and stopped her. Enough. They would hang her meat above their fires, and that was pointless. Their hunger was greater than the flesh she had to offer. Nathan Lee dismounted slowly, in plain sight and with broad motions. He gave the shooters his back as he went about stripping the mare of tack. He dumped the saddle and bridle in a heap by the road. On second thought he kept the saddle blanket for himself.
Then he pointed one hand up the highway toward Los Alamos, not for the horse’s sake, but so that the snipers could understand his intentions exactly, and stepped away. He stood on the white and yellow center stripes with his hands empty, watching while the Appaloosa turned and briskly trotted back through the graveyard of vehicles.
She didn’t tarry. There was no forage, not with winter nearly on and the land poisoned. She didn’t gallop, and he was glad for that, too. He didn’t want the snipers to feel rushed to judgment. This way they would have time to make up their minds to spare her.
Her hooves clapped on the asphalt. She faded through the smog, a dappled ghost. He remembered his boat on the Alaska shore, how it had drifted off into the ocean mist the moment he looked away. Necessary risks. The horse turned a bend and then she was gone.
He rolled the saddle blanket, faced the river again, and started walking. The stripes stretched like miles. He kept his head up, trying to force aside the image of his face in their crosshairs. No one called halt as he started over the bridge. Wild, gaunt figures waited at the far end, glowering, brandishing guns, long spears, axes for firewood, bows with razor-bladed hunting arrows, even long-handled framing hammers. Some wore motorcycle, bicycle, or football helmets. Some wore gas masks. It didn’t seem possible a man, even a mad prophet, could command such rabble.
The quixotic creatures stood there, heads up, facing west, aimed at Los Alamos. It was a curious scene. They were all ready for battle…without an enemy in sight. Running north to south, the invasion was poised. Only the river gave them any shape.
It wasn’t much of a bridge, he remembered now. Over the weeks, it had loomed larger
and larger in the minds of Los Alamos, a span between one world and another. But it was just a short, flat stretch.
“No gifts?” someone taunted. “No big promises?”
Nathan Lee tried to look steady. His heart was racing. His mouth was dry.
“What’s here?” one of the scarred apparitions demanded.
Nathan Lee gave up the horse blanket without a protest.
Someone shoved him from behind. They didn’t ask his name. It was as void to them as his purpose, which no one asked either. They were incurious. He had no answers for them, none that mattered. He’d thought they might ask about Los Alamos, its defenses, its riches, its fears. But in their minds, they owned it already.
One of the soldiers came forward with a big smile. “Where’s our manners?” He spoke broadly. “Man comes off his mountain, all shaved and neat. Bold as day. Down to heal the little people, am I right?”
It was a gallows smile. He was out for sport. Nathan Lee waited. The man spit in his face.
It was only the start, Nathan Lee knew. He wiped the warm gob from his cheek, looked at it on his fingers, then back at the soldier. He could cringe or strike back, and what was going to come next would unfold with the same deadly violence. Their fists were scarred, their faces bruised. They had mauled each other bloody waiting for someone like him. Once his beating began, they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves. He heard the water, and an image flashed of his body floating downriver into the logjam of bodies.
For a moment there seemed nothing to do about it. Then it came to him that for all their rifles and malice, these same men had not shot the Appaloosa. They still had some spark of poetry in them.
The soldier’s false smile widened. They circled him. Hard laughter all around. Then Nathan Lee surprised them. He surprised himself. Without another thought, he swiped the spit across his tongue. He took the contagion.