Year Zero (42 page)

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N
OVEMBER 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 bloodshed.

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.

D
ECEMBER

I
t 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 unwelcome 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.

O
N
D
ECEMBER
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.

Even as they watched, a few replacements were boosted up to take their turns on the crosses. The “crucified” men pulled their arms from the ropes and got down. Again Los Alamos found a comfortable logic. “They’re nothing but stunt men,” a council member commented.

“How can they stand the cold?” someone remarked. “I can almost feel the splinters.”

“What will it lead to?” a woman asked.

“It’s harmless,” her neighbor said.

“It’s violent. Even if it’s violence to themselves.”

“It’s only theater,” a sociologist pronounced. “Their suffering is a form of entertainment. The crosses are a stage.”

Nathan Lee disagreed, but kept it to himself. Couldn’t they see that the occupied crosses faced Los Alamos? The encampment was sending the city a message in flesh.

The radical few became many. In the warmer hours of midday, all of the crosses along the river came to be inhabited. Nathan Lee was reminded of accounts of the aftermath of Spartacus’s slave revolt and the Jews’ rebellion in Jerusalem. Men writhed on crosses perched among tents and wrecked cars. Families wept at their feet. Smoke drifted up in mean curls.

M
AYBE ESCAPE
was his natural condition. With every passing hour, Nathan Lee imagined the footsteps of fresh plague victims joining the siege, sealing off the valley. It seemed increasingly unlikely the city could ever be evacuated to the WIPP sanctuary, which he shunned anyway. He kept looking west. The headless volcano beckoned. The temptations came on the afternoon breeze.
Take your love,
they whispered,
flee into the desert.

There were hundreds of Anasazi cave dwellings in the Four Corners region. With the Captain’s help, he’d plotted them on a map. He could flee with Miranda, hole up, outwait the fanatics streaming toward Los Alamos, and then run loose through the world with what was left of their time. It would mean betraying her father, to whom he’d promised to deliver Miranda, or trying to betray him. Nathan Lee took it for granted that Paul Abbot had his every move under the tightest surveillance. He was more of a prisoner than the prisoners in Miranda’s basement. Even if he could escape Los Alamos, Miranda would never agree to leave with him. Her devotion to the city—her utter faith in it—baffled and frustrated him. She acted as if she’d been born here.

And so, for now, Nathan Lee resigned himself. He did the next best thing to making his own escape. He devised the clones’ escape.

The notion gratified him. He despised what had been done to them. They and their sacrificed brothers had been used a thousand different ways by Los Alamos, from serving as lab subjects to titillating the city’s mystical itch. Now they could be used one final time, as his surrogate for breaking free.

“I’m thinking the boys should get turned loose,” he announced to the Captain in the quiet of one afternoon. They were watching the yard over cameras. Over the weeks, the prisoners had slowly begun to trickle up from their cells and brave the sun again. Ben was the stalwart, first every morning, last at dusk, walking, feeding the fire, walking, walking, getting those muscles ready. Nathan Lee could see his mind at work. Ben had not missed a day. For weeks he’d had the place to himself. Now it was inhabited again. The burnt sacrifices of birds and squirrels resumed, though the season was getting cold and they’d largely hunted the place out.

At the moment, Ben was walking the wall circuit. Big, loping strides carried him around the yard. Men followed behind, the earnest ones matching his pace, the slower ones yakking away.

By the fire, Eesho was holding forth about the coming armageddon. It had been over a month since Ochs had kowtowed to him, but the encounter continued to whet his appetite for disciples. Borrowing from Revelation and from the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he had patched together a hybrid parable about a giant demon, one of the Sons of Darkness, begging him for forgiveness, and a queen of the dead, a woman with green eyes and hair like red gold whose name was Miranda, and her slaves, who were Nathan Lee and Izzy. Each day his sermons became a little bolder and more intricate.

“About time someone brought that up,” the Captain replied.

Nathan Lee was surprised. “Then you’re not opposed to them going free?”

“I wouldn’t treat a dog the way we’ve had to treat those men.”

Nathan Lee was astonished. “But you’re their keeper,” he protested.

“Better me than most,” said the Captain. “Anyhow, I had this hunch someone like you might show up. And then it would need someone like me to be where I am, doing what I’m doing, who could nod his head yes.”

Nathan Lee guessed that was one way to view the universe. “You’re going to let them go?” he reiterated.

“Not yet. And not me,” said the Captain. “But when the time’s right, I’m all for you.”

“Well, all right then,” Nathan Lee said, trying to believe his luck. “So when is the right time?”

As it developed, the Captain had put a great deal of thought to it already. For the next several hours, they might as well have been discussing the release of zoo animals into the wilderness. The clones were too wild, and at the same time too tame. They were dangerous, but habituated. They couldn’t be freed anywhere close to the city, or they might try to return and prey upon it. Sending them down to the pilgrim camp would be like throwing them into quicksand. It was a pit of despair and deprivations down along the river. If the deck sweeps had not been called off, they could have been transferred by helicopter to some distant place, but now that wasn’t an option either. After Miranda’s directive shutting down human experimentation, Los Alamos had ceased the harvesting of cities, which were probably finished anyway.

Their release, in short, would have to wait until E-Day, their fabled evacuation date. Nathan Lee worried that if and when that day ever arrived, there would be so much chaos the guards might forget to open the cells. In crossing America, he had heard stories of prisons and zoos filled with the carcasses of captives who had starved to death. The Captain took the job of programming the cell doors to automatically open an hour after the city emptied.

In the meantime, Nathan Lee wanted to prepare the clones for alien times. They knew how to quarry limestone, sow wheat, work leather, smith iron, and herd goats. But survival in the ruins of America was going to require different skills. One can of spoiled food could wipe them out with botulism. One wrong highway could land them in the Canadian winter. The cities might be dead, but they were still mechanically alive, and deadly. The clones needed a crash course in the twenty-first century.

“You’ve got your work cut out,” said the Captain.

Nathan Lee went to Izzy, who thought it was a terrible idea. “I told you, they know we’re the enemy. Eesho’s got them ready to kill us if we show our faces.”

“We’ll select just one of them. Educate him. Show him the ropes. When the time comes, he can lead the rest.”

Izzy balked. “Why would any of them trust us? They’re onto us now. In their shoes, I wouldn’t trust us.”

“They’re prisoners. They have no choice.”

“Fine,” grumbled Izzy. “We’ll pick one. But which one?”

“Someone they’ll listen to.”

“Not his bloody lordship,” Izzy protested. “I’m not about to hand Eesho the keys to the castle. He already thinks he’s God almighty.”

“Not him,” Nathan Lee said, “Ben.”

Izzy chewed on his moustache. “I thought you wanted a leader. He’s a loner. Last time he had the chance, he bolted off all by himself.”

“That was different. He saw the chance and took it. And look, now, they follow him whether he wants to lead or not.”

Izzy grumbled. “Better him than most, I suppose.”

Class began next morning.

Ben was taken from the yard and led to the same spartan room where Ochs had asked Eesho for a miracle. Nathan Lee and Izzy waited for him at a table with the day’s lessons arranged on top. There was a globe of the world, a can of beans, and a can opener.