Year Zero (47 page)

T
he valley lit white.

Miranda stepped back from the flash.

The far mountains went dark. Abruptly they surged to orange and red in the gathering fireball. That suddenly the air raid sirens fell silent.

The only thing she knew about such things came from movies. Next would come a tidal wave of wind and fire. Buildings would ignite, glass fly, forests bend. Their flesh would melt.

The Captain thought so, too. “Get down!” he yelled. They fell into the snow on top of the roof.

But the aftershock never reached them. Not a breeze.

The weaponeers must have been planning it for days. The bomb was perfectly planted, sized just right. She could picture it from above. With the base of the mesa for its anchor wall, the nuclear wind had cast out across the valley, east and south and north…away from the city.

At last the sound of a thunderclap cracked above the city. It passed over them to the west, into the night.

On her elbows, Miranda crawled through the snow to the edge of the roof. The mushroom cloud was flowering to the south and east, midway to Santa Fe. It was pink. The head reached their height, then went on growing, a long, skinny stalk poking at the stars. The stars showed. The blast had melted a hole in the very sky.

The Captain joined her. Side by side, they peered off toward the valley.

“What have you done?” murmured Miranda.

“I had no idea,” said the Captain. His voice was full of shock.

She closed her eyes. “Not you,” she said. “God damn my father.”

Everything stood revealed. Ochs had been released to preach. He had unwittingly brought the hordes of faithful into one place. Her father had wielded the people’s faith against them. He had dangled the city as bait, then struck with one swift blow. Their enemy was abolished.

“Don’t,” the Captain stopped her quietly. “He’s your father.”

She vomited. Onto her arms, into the snow, over the edge.

“It was self-defense,” said the Captain. But his voice was hollow.

“They were leaving.”

“I know,” he whispered.

“A nuclear bomb. Against children?”

The Captain searched for justification. “What did they expect? This is Los Alamos.”

“They had no warning.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“For some it might have.”

“They were already dead,” he said. “All of them.”

“That’s monstrous.”

“They were done with the world. They’d said their prayers. For them the siege was just another way to die. A quicker way.”

“The bomb was a mercy?”

“We’re spared,” said the Captain. “It’s not pleasant how we’re spared. But now they won’t come.”

“A million people.”

“Now we have a future,” he reminded her. “The future you wanted.”

“Not like this.”

She looked at the Captain and his horror was explicit. He looked old. He didn’t believe his own words. She got to her knees. “Come inside.”

“Yes.” But he seemed so fragile. He was shivering. She had to help him to his feet.

They descended the stairs.

Up and down the hallways, every phone was ringing. It was the signal. The authorities were reversing the 911 emergency call system. Every phone in every office and home in Los Alamos was getting the same recorded message.

The exodus was beginning.

She went into an office and picked up one of the phones. A pleasant voice was saying, “…to your designated evacuation depot. This is not a test. Please go….”

“This can’t be real,” said Miranda. “They’ve just incinerated every last person in the valley.”

Then suddenly she
did
understand. The generals’ words came back to her.
When the time comes, we will part the waters.
While they still had the enemy in their sights, they had taken their shot. Now her father was ready for them.

“I have to go,” said the Captain. “My wife….”

“Of course,” she said.

Miranda advanced down the hallway in a daze. There was no panic. Doors stood open. Scientists were quietly shaking hands and taking last-minute group snapshots by their bench labs and cubicles. They calmly hung up their lab jackets and safety goggles, and walked away. She could read their thinking. They had resisted this moment for years, but now that it was here, they were relieved. The virus hunt would continue, but more reasonably, in safety, with time on their side for a change.

A man patted her arm. “It was a good fight,” he said.

“It’s not over,” she said. “Nothing’s changed.”

He gave her a funny look, and hurried off.

She went outside and crossed the bridge to the city. It was one in the morning. The streets were filling with people bustling home to their families. There were small details to attend, she knew. Some had decided to poison their pets, others to free them. Through windows with opened curtains, she saw people making their beds, straightening pictures on the wall, looking around to make sure all was neat. They left their Christmas trees and electric Hanukkah candles on. They’d packed their bags long ago. There was no need to say goodbye to anyone. They would all be seeing each other down below. That was the plan. She saw people locking their doors for the last time, and then, unlocking them…letting go.

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.

M
IRANDA 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….