Year Zero

by Jeff Long

  The snow had stopped. The sky had cleared. It was chilly. Pulled from sleep, children were crying. Block by block, the exodus took shape. They had practiced for this event once every month for the past two years. The shock of the bomb seemed offset by the shock of evacuation. Their faces were laced with fear and wonder.

  Miranda felt like a ghost as she passed through their lines. Citizens were orderly, if excited. The air was freezing. Under their parkas and fleece jackets, many wore vacation clothes: Hawaiian print shirts, sun-dresses, tank tops, blue jeans. The carved-out salt chamber beckoned to them like a tropical paradise.

  Each had their “tenner” in hand or strapped to little airline carts, or in backpacks, the ten kilos of personal possessions which every man, woman, and child was allowed to bring. You could take anything at all: books, software, teddy bears, clean socks. Whiskey, or psychedelics. Whatever might get you through the next ten or twenty or forty years sealed twenty-one hundred feet inside the earth. For as long as Miranda had been here, the contents of one’s tenner were a subject of conversation, gossip, even jokes. Your choices weren’t simply a matter of taste. They reflected what kind of human being you were. Grave goods, Nathan Lee had called them. Relics that people took into the next world.

  Each neighborhood and mesa finger had its own boarding sites. The passengers waited politely for their transportation, stamping in the cold. The clear mountain air was fouled by diesel fumes as sixteen-and eighteen-wheelers backed up to the docks. The trailers were sheathed in triple-layers of black quarter-inch rubber membrane normally used for roofing. Every rivet was epoxy sealed. The cabs were armored against guerrilla attacks, the windshields bullet-proofed. The drivers wore moon suits. The vehicles looked more like submarines than Peterbilts.

  Straps hung from the ceiling like meat hooks. There were no windows, no seats, no snack bars. It was going to be standing room only for the next twelve or twenty or thirty hours. Soldiers piled their tenners in growing mountains to one side.

  At one depot after another, people called out to Miranda. “You can come in our truck,” they offered. Everyone wanted her with them.

  “I’m staying,” she said.

  They were appalled. “But you can’t. It’s too late for that.”

  “It’s just beginning,” she assured them. She didn’t ask anyone to stay. They were afraid. The bomb had spoken to their mortality. So far Miranda had heard no one speak about it out loud, the holocaust her father had unleashed. You could see it in their eyes, though. This was final. No atheists in the foxholes, she thought. All the brave talk of drawing a line in the sand, holding the fort, making a stand…gone. She didn’t blame them. They simply hadn’t known their hearts before. Now they did.

  A woman approached her. “How can we leave you? Come with us,” she said. “Think about it. You’ll be all alone.”

  Miranda smiled. That surprised her. She could smile.

  “We’ll remember you,” the woman said, backing away.

  “Thank you,” said Miranda.

  Several times she overheard Nathan Lee’s name. They linked her to him and watched her pass among them with pitying eyes. In their minds she was the tragic widow. Is that all this is? she asked herself. A romantic suicide? She rejected her doubt. It was more. It had to be. Her grand idea had come to envelop her. She had set it in motion, and now she’d become its passenger. It was carrying her along. But also it wasn’t carrying her at all. She had already reached her destination.

  Every light in every room and along every street had been left on. It was as if the city wanted to guarantee that not even a shadow might be left behind. The bright lights made it hard to see any constellations between the clouds. They wanted one last taste of the stars. When the clouds parted to show Mars, a great cheer went up. Every child was raised on shoulders to memorize the sight.

  Quickly, within a half hour, the convoy was loaded.

  The earthmovers set off first to clean the blistered highways of debris. There would be no snow down in the valley, Miranda realized. The bomb would have melted every trace of it for miles. There would be minimal to zero damage to the highway itself, no blast crater. It would be more like the aftermath of a typhoon. The generals knew their business.

  Gunships pounced up, flanking the vanguard. At last the hundreds of trucks started to unwind from Los Alamos, one behind another, coming together into a single black snake that glided off into the depths. As she started back to Alpha Lab, the convoy passed her going the opposite direction.

  It took less than an hour to empty the city. Silence rushed in. She watched from the doorway and Los Alamos looked like a kingdom of ice, motionless, its radiance sharp and clean. After a while, the dogs started barking to each other.

  MIRANDA WAS NOT QUITE SURE what came next, and so she decided to make herself a cup of hot chocolate. She didn’t particularly like hot chocolate. But she felt cold, and it was a wintry night. Hot chocolate sounded nice.

  As she made her way through the building, the lab was alive. Computer screens glowed in darkened rooms. Machinery hummed. The smell of burned coffee and microwave popcorn drifted through the air ducts. The PCR robots were still at work, automatically stamping out more and more copies of DNA fragments. A centrifuge was whirling a blood sample in infinite orbit. This was her inheritance.

  Descending to C floor, she went to the small kitchenette and put a pot of water on the oven plate. She rooted through the cabinet and found the packets of chocolate, and took her time cleaning a mug. The simple tasks let her not think too much.

  She felt sleepless and dazed and guilt-ridden. The world seemed vile. With each passing minute, it was increasingly clear that the nuclear slaughter had been a gift. In one stroke, it had scraped the valley clean, incinerating not only their enemy, but the immediate threat of plague. She was thankful, but did not want to be.

  She placed her cellphone on the table beside the mug, trying to decide when to call her father. She wanted to punish him. Before the convoy reached the WIPP sanctuary, she wanted to tell him herself that she had disowned him forever. It seemed like a first step. His atrocity was not her reason for staying, but she would make it sound that way. It was important that he understand the gulf between them. She wanted to hate him. She wanted to weep. She wanted to quit thinking about it.

  Her blood sugar spiked with the hot chocolate. Miranda wiped her nose, raised her chin, and reached for the phone. Time to bear him the bad news. Let him reap what he had sown. She braced herself and pressed the key.

  Searching for service, the window read. That was odd. Their cellphones normally worked without a hitch, even four stories beneath the surface. She went to one of the regular phones, and there was a dial tone. She dialed her father’s number, only to get a recorded voice:All lines are temporarily busy, please try your call again. How could the lines be busy, though? There was no one left.

  For the next few minutes she experimented with the phone system. Calls worked within Los Alamos. She reached a half dozen answering machines and listened to the voices of people she would never see again. It was the long distance service that was down. At a satellite recon booth, she paused to check the convoy’s status. Expecting a long chain of thermal images, she found instead…nothing. The screens were all static. Finally it occurred to her. The lines were fried. The transceivers and microwave stations and cell towers had been scrambled by the bomb’s electromagnetic pulse. The satellites were blinded. She was more alone than she’d known.

  Her isolation came flooding in. She hadn’t really thought about it, but now it was obvious she’d counted on some form of communication with the WIPP people. Suddenly Miranda wasn’t sure she was strong enough for this. She could go mad up here, wandering the streets, distilling nonsensical potions, talking to ghosts in their apartments. The city was small, but more than large enough to become her labyrinth. The reactor would keep pumping out electricity for decades to come, but one by one the lights would go out. She couldn’t hope to maintain the complex,
much less go out into the world searching for survivors. What had she been thinking? For a bad moment, her resolution crumbled. It wasn’t too late. With a moon suit, in a humvee, if she started now, she could still catch the convoy, go down into the earth, ask her father’s forgiveness….

  Then her panic spent itself. She was too tired. And cold. She couldn’t seem to get warm. A blanket, a little sleep, that’s what she needed. After that she could start to inventory what was left of Eden.

  SHE WOKE, on the floor of someone’s office, to the sound of elevator doors opening and closing at the end of the hallway. Had someone returned? She almost turned on the light, then heard the crash of glassware. A door banged open. More glass broke. Men’s voices filtered down the corridor.

  She edged the door wider and darted her head out. At the far end of the hall, hunched like a hunter, a man was carrying a broken pipe for a spear. He disappeared around the corner. Dear god, she thought. Survivors.

  It was nearly seven in the morning. Time enough, she realized, for anyone to have ascended the highway from the valley. Nathan Lee’s words floated to her. Be careful what you wish for. You want them to be lambs. But what if they’re wolves.

  The bomb must have spared hundreds, if not thousands of the pilgrims. Huddled in their canyons and arroyos miles away, the blast might have passed right over them. And now they had come, for their hajj or simply for their pound of flesh. They would destroy the city. She tasted the bitterness. You destroyed yourself.

  More doors crashed open. Furniture tipped over. The ransacking went on.

  Footsteps approached. She tried to reckon their numbers. One, it seemed. Limping. Images of Hiroshima sprang at her, flash-burned victims, skin hanging. Mad as hell.

  A tall silhouette rippled across the door’s opaque glass. The footsteps passed. She waited a minute, then eased the door open an inch at a time. The floor was spotted with bloody, barefoot prints.

  Glass splintered in an office door. Miranda heard yelling, wild men, a babel of words. They were hunting. They would find her eventually. She armed herself with a champagne bottle left over from someone’s office party, then put it down.

  Her only hope was the elevator. Miranda’s thoughts raced. Once up to the first floor, she could bolt for the back exit, hide in the forest or in a cave. The mesa walls were pockmarked with them. She could outwait the invaders, raid for food, at night make a fire. Food! She stuffed her pockets with food, little packets of crackers and candy. She found a box of kitchen matches. An idea came to her.

  More crashing, more shattering of glass. They were searching room to room.

  She took one of the matches and scratched it on the box, and held the flame beneath the glass rod on the fire detector. It took forever, it seemed.

  Abruptly, the sprinkler system bucked on. Chemical mist hissed from the ceiling nozzle. Office and hall lights winked off, and were replaced by strobes. The alarm began honking savagely.

  She heard men running past, shouting, bare feet slapping the wet floor. One slipped, skidded, banged hard against her door. His shadow rose up, ran on.

  At last their voices dimmed. She opened the door. The elevator was only fifty feet away. Walk or run? She did both in small bursts. Broken windows on office doors gaped like ragged jaws. Glass lay everywhere. Chairs and desks had been thrown so hard against the walls they hung from the dry wall. Books had been ripped to shreds, papers scattered. They were in a fury, laying waste to everything. Their hatred made her weak.

  Miranda reached the elevator, hair dripping. The doors stood shut. She pushed the Up button, then, for good measure, the Down button. She backed into the well of the door frame and waited.

  The sprinklers went on raining down. The alarm was deafening. She pushed the buttons again.

  A man gave a shout at the far end of the corridor. They’d spotted her. Two more rounded the corner. Miranda forced herself to stay and wait.

  The three men came sprinting up the hallway. It was a foot race to reach her first. The strobes cast tiger stripes on them, dark, then bright, then dark. They had knives, an axe, a club.

  Miranda stabbed the buttons.

  Their bare feet gripped the linoleum like flesh claws. They were so fast. She slapped at the buttons with her open palm. Where was the elevator?

  Too late she saw the sign to one side:In Case of Fire, Use Stairs. Of course. Her heart sank. She’d bluffed herself into a corner. The building’s power would have shut down at the first alarm. And yet the buttons were lighted. She stabbed them again. With nowhere to run, she slugged her back against the doors, faced her hunters.

  It was only in the final thirty feet that she caught sight of their faces, and for an instant her terror changed to surprise. These weren’t outsiders. How could she have forgotten them?

  “Eesho?” she said.

  It was him in the lead, the false messiah. His eyes grew large. Only now did he recognize her, the woman who had humiliated and terrorized him. The false mother.

  Her father’s word sprang from the distant past, Ochs’s word, too: abominations.

  Who had let them out? What did it matter? She was trapped with her own handiwork. For a moment she felt pity for them all, for the men torn from their grave, for herself in her confusion, but especially for the life growing in her womb. It was dizzying. Her world had broken loose of its neat orbit. If there was a lesson that was it, the oldest lesson: once in motion her creations had a life of their own.

  More of the clones arrived, soaked by the sprinklers, their arms and feet bleeding from glass, eyes jacked wide with adrenaline, armed with kitchenware and pieces of the building and industrial garbage. One gripped a meat cleaver. Miranda recognized its beat-up wood handle and leather loop. It came from the bone lab. Without knowing it, the clones had found their own remains.

  Eesho raised his axe. She wanted to plead for her child. Too late. She signified everything that was evil to him. Even if she could have spoken his language, there was no arguing with that. Her womb and fertility were simply one more malignancy to be chopped down.

  The moment slowed. He was bellowing at her, some curse or justification. His words turned to slurry. Every detail sharpened. She saw the veins on his forehead and raised one arm to try ward away the axe.

  She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. The axe blade reached its apogee. And stopped. Beneath the ugly honking alarm, there was a sudden, absurd, merry ping.

  Eesho looked up. The doors slid open behind her. Miranda tumbled backward. The elevator car was dry and dimly lighted. Miranda scuttled back from the clones…and struck the legs of a man inside.

  His face took her breath, a ripped, sewn rag of a face. He peered down with reptilian detachment, then looked out at the other clones, their hair and beards slicked flat with the synthetic rain. They had her.

  He laid one hand on her head and cocked her face back to look more closely. “Miranda,” he uttered, and patted her head. She belonged to him now.

  She had never met Ben, had refused in fact. But she knew him. Like the rest of Los Alamos, she had become familiar with his fright mask of scar tissue. Of all their monsters, it was he who had best suited their dread and most excused the pains they inflicted. His was the least human of faces. But he had been Nathan Lee’s favorite, and he knew her name somehow. What had Nathan Lee told him?

  Eesho burst into an angry tirade. Ben answered him sternly. She didn’t understand a word. The alarms throbbed like a giant heartbeat. The strobes lashed them. They looked like creatures etched by lightning, lurid, then shadowy, flickering in and out of existence. They craned to hear Ben. He seemed to be countering Eesho’s ultimatums with a choice of some kind.

  At last a man stepped forward from the bunched crowd. Eesho tried to block him from entering the elevator, and the man went around him. Another approached. Eesho grabbed his arm, and the man shoved him to the ground. One by one, they edged around him.

  The smell of sweat and chemicals filled the car. They jostled to make room. Th
e sudden peace was almost ludicrous to her. They contradicted themselves, full of rage one instant, sober and patient the next. As the doors closed, only Eesho remained out there, still bellowing at them from the shadows. The noise shut away.

  For a moment, the elevator didn’t move. Ben carefully, studiously pressed the button for the first floor. Nathan Lee had trained him well. The gesture wasn’t lost on the others. He was guiding them out of here.

  The ride was short. She squeezed into the back corner. No one said a word. For a minute, they were all just fellow passengers.

  The car came to a halt.

  Even as the doors opened, Miranda saw bodies lying in a row on the lobby floor, and their pile of ugly, makeshift weapons. At a small distance, hidden behind columns and scarred riot shields, soldiers were pointing their guns at the mouth of the elevator. “Cut the power,” she heard a man shout. “Lock it open. We got a full load this time.”

  The light inside the elevator went out.

  “Ben!” the voice called. “You in there? Is he in there? I can’t see.”

  With a shout, the clones pressed to the sides of the elevator car, shoving backward from the doors, trapping Miranda behind them. She was tall, and could see over their shoulders and between their heads. The lobby was so bright. It was blinding at first.

  The entrance to Alpha Lab faced due east. The winter sun was just rising, its rays glancing straight in. Now she saw a throng of people in front of the building, out in the parking lot. They looked like figures made of light, walking back and forth, keeping vigil, waiting.

  The world assembled in an instant. The convoy must have turned around. Her city had returned!

  “Ben.” A shout. “What you got? Bring them out. One at a time. No running. Don’t need more blood. Tell ’em.”