Jeff Long, page 31
“What would you do out there?”
“Find our homes, what else?”
He snorted at them.
“Help us,maal-paa-naa.”
He turned his back to them and walked away.
Nathan Lee explained to the Captain about the escape talk, just in case. He didn’t want the guards overreacting. “It’s only talk,” he said, “and they trust me. If anything develops, I’ll hear about it. We can head it off then.”
The Captain was not alarmed. “Nice to see a bit of starch in them,” he said.
MIRANDA HEARD ABOUTthe escape plotting. She brought it up one evening near the edge of the roof of Alpha Lab. This had become their getaway, a place to share a quick picnic, then return to work. From up here, sitting on an old, cheap Indian blanket spread on the gravel, they had a view to the west of the far valley and north of the lights of Los Alamos across the bridge. Usually they grabbed whatever was at hand on their way to the stairs. Tonight they were eating apples and peanut butter.
“But what if they really do try something?” Miranda said. “You weren’t here when Ben escaped. It put the whole city in a panic. And he nearly died.”
“Don’t worry. The lone bolt for freedom is one thing, a matter of desperation or sudden chance. A large-scale breakout is very different. It takes a long time to come together. It rarely happens.”
He told her about a group of Maoists who had plotted to escape from Badrighot, his Kathmandu jail. “They plotted,” he said. “And plotted and plotted. It went on for months. The conspirators came up with an elaborate plan. But the plan was useless without faith. You have to believe freedom is possible in the first place. In the case of the Maoists, they never broke the mental chains. They never did go for the wall. And the clones won’t either.”
“But they might. You want them to.”
“It’s not going to happen.”
“What are you so happy about?” she said to him. “Even if they made it out, the virus would do them in.”
“You said their immune systems have an edge over ours,” Nathan Lee reminded her. “They’d have three years.”
“They’d be doomed. Three years, that’s all.” She dismissed it.
“Three years,” Nathan Lee reiterated. “That’s a lot of world.”
She frowned. “Turning them loose into the plague,” she said, “that would be the same as injecting them with virus. They’re safe here.”
“I’m not talking about turning them loose.”
“You’re thinking it, though. I can tell. But it would be a death sentence for them.”
“For them,” he retorted, “it would be a whole lifetime.”
She blinked patiently, as if he were dashing around throwing open the shutters, letting in unnecessary light. “Three years,” she said. “Then they’d die. None of them would survive. We know that for a fact. Their clonal twins were exposed to the virus in South Sector labs two and three years ago. At first we had high hopes, because they seemed immune. But then it turned out they’re only protected against whatever benign strain was running along the edges of year zero. And what’s out there now isn’t benign. They’re safe here.”
“For now,” he said.
“Once we find the cure,” she said, “they’ll have a real lifetime ahead of them. Thirty years, forty, fifty.”
Nathan Lee smeared peanut butter on his slice of apple. He took a bite. She utterly believed in the cure.Once, not if. “Put yourself in their place,” he said. “Faced with what they face right now, you’d take three years in a heartbeat. So would I.”
She gave him a strange look. “If I offered you the certainty of three years versus the possibility of thirty, you’d take the three?”
“Hypothetically speaking?” he said.
“Whatever.”
He felt bold, a little swept away. “Think what we could see out there, Miranda.”
“We?” she said.
She had heard it. He let the word hang there. She could it take it how she wanted. It was an invitation, or as much of one as he dared with her…or with himself.
He was ever mindful of Grace, ever. It wearied him, and his weariness felt like the worst betrayal. His quest had become a curse. His love had become a disease, or worse an abstraction. He loved his daughter because she had been his to love. Now he could not move ahead with or without her. Sometimes he could barely breathe. To speak of freedom like this felt perilous. He was so afraid his heart might change, and then who would he be? But how could he not dream?
When he didn’t commit himself any deeper, she said, “Is that what you’d do then? Run away?”
“That’s not what I’d call it.” He suddenly said, “Have you ever seen Paris?”
“Paris?”
He rushed on. “It would be all ours. Or Barcelona, or Vienna. The Alps in summer. Or Syria, I know the ruins. And Petra, it’s incredible. The light at noon. The cliffs are red.”
“Are you trying to seduce me?” She sounded stern. Analytical.
He quickly backpedaled. “You said we were talking hypothetically.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“That was you.” She was earnest, not playful. He’d blundered.
“I’m teaching myself to fly,” he stated, scrapping the plural. “I got books from the library. There’s software that walks you through it. Small fixed-wing aircraft. That’s the way to go, hopping from one airfield to another.”
In his mind’s eye, he had imagined setting off through the grand remains, winging deep between the canyons of New York City, setting off across the Atlantic, looting, handling fantastic treasures, exploring. “Paris would look as ancient as Angkor Wat,” he said. “The Louvre would be mossy. The bodies would be bone. You could camp on the beaches of Greek islands.” She frowned. He corrected himself. “One,” he said, “could sleep on top of the pyramids. I could go wherever I wanted.”
He knew something about traveling through the land of the dead. With care, he might make it all the way around the planet. The world would devour him, but not before he devoured it.
“You’re leaving?” she said.
“Call it a dream,” he said. To love someone who was living, for a change, or at least love someone within his reach. He raced over his guilt, trying to get ahead of it. It was a matter of momentum. If he paused to think of what he was thinking, he would stall.
“But you can’t,” she said.
His heart lifted. Was she reaching for him? “I’d never be missed,” he tried.
“What about the city?”
Her disbelief backed him off. He had never heard her say it like that, as if she held the life of this place in the palms of her hands.
“Los Alamos?”
“Yes,” she insisted. “We need everyone here. It’s all here.”
“All what?”
“Everything.” She scooped at the air. “Salvation.”
She was dead serious. “I thought you were going to say, you know, the last of civilization,” he teased.
“That, too,” she added without a pause. “When all the other cities are dead, we’ll be the last city.”
“I guess that’s something to carve on the tombstone,” he said. He wanted one final grand expedition through the ruins. And she wanted to nurse civilization right up to its last gasp. It made him feel lonely, for her as well as him.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “The survivors will come.”
“Ah, them,” he said. The missing links.
“The satellite teams have tracked over seven hundred survivor incidents now. Campfires, mostly, but car headlights, too, and the heat signatures of engines. They’re out there, circling around, keeping alive.”Inheriting the earth, thought Nathan Lee.Doing what I want to do.
“They’re all overseas,” he pointed out. “They’ll never make it here. They don’t even know we exist.”
“But there will be American survivors.” Quietly, she said, “Once America dies off. The disease will sort them out.”
“What makes you think they’ll come here?”
She gestured at the lights. “They’ll see us from far away.”
“But who will they be, these survivors?”
“They could be our last hope,” she said. It was like a mantra. “They may have developed antibodies to modern Corfu….”
“No,” he interrupted. “I mean who will they be?”
She was confused. “Americans. Probably people from this land mass, maybe migrant groups drifting south from Canada….”
“Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “You want them to be lambs. But what if they’re wolves?”
She didn’t answer.
“You have no idea what it’s like out there.”
She looked away from him at her beloved city.
“Maybe you should be afraid,” he said.
She stood up. “I expected better of you,” she said. He listened to her footsteps crunch through the gravel. The door shut behind her. After she was gone, he continued sitting on the edge of the roof, wondering what was real outside of his desire.
AN HOUR LATER, he reached the outskirts of South Sector, breathing hard. He came here often, always like this, stealing through the trees, covered in night. It was cold, but the jog had warmed him. As always, South Sector lay beyond the forest like an island of light. For a place with such a dark reputation, it was ungodly bright. Klieg lights blazed. The fence line glittered like a a silvery wall.
It had become a regular stand-off. South Sector held Ochs. Ochs held the secret of Grace. Nathan Lee had the wire cutters and the knife to cut her free. But not the courage. It was more than that. He had lost his direction. The world had never seemed so immense. What if Ochs was only an excuse to be lost? What if Grace no longer existed? He dueled with his doubts.
Nathan Lee edged through the trees. The tops of scattered clusters of buildings stood above the gleaming dike of triple fence. He drew closer. The compound foreshortened. At last he could see only guard towers and coils of razor wire and warning signs surrounding it.
The cleared earth blazed white. There was no in-between in that no man’s land. No shadows allowed. It was always like this. The clones wanted out. He wanted in.
They would catch him. That was a given. The clearing was marked. It was mined and there were sensors and cameras and patrols. Even so, he might have stepped into the light. But he didn’t trust his destiny.
“Nathan Lee.”
He ignored the whisper. It was the forest. The wind.
The voice whispered again. This time, he ducked and turned, and it was Miranda.
She shifted in the screen of brush and woods. The shadows striped her. Her eyes were green lights in the darkness.
She had followed him. He was flustered, as much by her stealth as by his carelessness. You had to run to stay with her, but that was by day. Where had she learned to move through the night? There was no path in here. From night to night he wasn’t sure how he would approach.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
The forest changed her. She was Miranda, but different. She moved backward into the deeper shadows. She was sure of herself. His foot snapped a twig. He lost sight of her. She moved, and he found her again. The shadows streamed like water.
He followed her further and further away from South Sector. The light dwindled. She paused. She didn’t stop, only let him catch up. She stayed in motion, latticed by shadows.
“How did you find me?” he said.
She tsk’ed. He was easy stalking. And it wasn’t her first time. It rattled him. She had watched him slouching on the border of light. He felt foolish.
“I come here to think,” he said.
She wouldn’t quit moving. She paced. He had to twist in circles to follow her.
“Why throw yourself away?” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You want to.”
“Want,” he said bitterly. “Everything I want, I can’t have. I’m faking it.”
“It’s stupid.” She was angry. Her hand shoved at him. He stumbled.
She started to push him again, but this time Nathan Lee caught her wrist. It felt like he was falling or holding on for dear life. Miranda could have jerked from his grip. Instead, she pulled, but not to pull away. She drew him in.
Later they would make a game of it, each accusing the other of stealing the first kiss. Then they would take turns laying claim to it. Then they would start over with each other all over again, telling and retelling their beginning until finally it felt woven into the myth of them. All lovers do it, creating the world fresh around them. The only difference is that some have less time for it than others. And so they hurried to catch up with themselves.
27
Golgotha
OCTOBER
Someone snuck into the yard one night and hung a crucifix in a crook of the tree. By the time Nathan Lee arrived in next morning, the yard was empty. The damage was done. Izzy stood by the tree.
“The clones took one look and bolted for the door,” Izzy told him. “Now they won’t come out.”
Nathan Lee plucked the crucifix from the crook of branches. The little figurine had its arms cast wide. The culprit had been Catholic, or stolen it from one. Protestants worshipped empty crosses, the transformation not the suffering. “Who would go to the trouble?” He held the thing in his hands. “And why?”
“Maybe it was meant as a gift,” said Izzy. “Or a token of their Lord’s Prayer, to declare solidarity. Modern Christian to primitive Christian. Probably nothing malicious.”
His mind had been full of Miranda, her lean body, her green eyes. He didn’t want the interference. He tossed the crucifix into the fire. “Now what?”
“Let’s just explain it to them,” Izzy wisecracked. “Boys, we’ve made a religion about a corpse nailed on wood.”
They had discussed it before. Even the primal Christians in the group wouldn’t buy it. The worship of the crucifixion hadn’t evolved for many centuries after the early Church began. The actual practice had needed to end before its adoration could begin.
“They think it’s an omen of things to come,” said Izzy. “If they had doubts before, they don’t anymore. This is hell. They’re in the hands of demons.”
The supernatural world was utterly real to them. Nathan Lee had heard it over and over in their testimonies to home. Demons were to blame for everything, for the cold air, for stomach and headaches, for strange noises on the far side of the courtyard walls, for their captivity and the voices on their intercoms, for their bouts of depression and uncontrollable anger. It was not something they could turn on and off.
There was a theory that consciousness, the idea of self, didn’t develop until two or three thousand years ago. To that point, the human brain hadn’t been wired to distinguish between self and being. The Year Zero clones straddled that psychological divide. For them, or most of them, demons and spirits were everywhere. The Bible talked aboutgo’el, or guardian spirits. Dreams were alternate realities. Their innermost thoughts were the voices of invisible creatures. Back then—a hundred generations ago—people could look at a burning bush and believe they were hearing the voice of God.
“We start over,” said Nathan Lee.
“Why?” said Izzy. “Why put them through it again? Maybe they’re better off buried in their cells.”
“No,” said Nathan Lee. “They’re not.”
They tried to lead by example, walking past the clones’ open cell doors. “You see?” Izzy told them, “It’s safe.”
“No,” men insisted. “The demons are waiting for us.”
Near the end of the day, as the shadows turned purple, Ben came out into the yard. Nathan Lee was squatting by the fire. A cold front was passing through. The yard looked bleak, like an arena with its walls blackened with smoke. Leaves swirled on the circular breeze.
Ben stood above him. “Where is that thing?” he asked. He meant the cross.
Sparks rose among the pine boughs. “In the fire,” said Nathan Lee. Part of it had fallen into the dirt. He jabbed at it with a stick. “There.”
“Why aren’t you afraid?”
Nathan Lee reached for the words, something suitable to his role as a scribe. “God writes our life.”
“If we let Him,” Ben said. Or perhaps he said, “Not if we don’t let Him,” or something like that. Nathan Lee’s Aramaic was elementary. Ben continued standing for another minute. Then he hunkered beside Nathan Lee at the edge of the fire pit. He found a stick of his own, and poked at the embers and flames.
Izzy appeared in the doorway and came hurrying over, his sandals flapping. “Here you are,” he said.
“Here we are,” said Nathan Lee. He motioned with his eyes for Izzy to join them. Izzy took his station to one side.
Ben pointed his stick at Nathan Lee’s missing toes. “They say you tried to escape,” he said.
“Like you,” said Nathan Lee. He gestured with his own stick at Ben’s scars and the missing tip of his ear.
Ben grunted. “We’re alike, I think.” The seams on his ripped face were purple from the cold, or the flames. They lay on his skin like vines.
“Two handsome men?” said Nathan Lee.
Another grunt. “That must be it,” Ben said.
Izzy looked from one to the other, trying to catch up with them. Or slow down. There was a rhythm here. He waited.
“I see you listening. And listening,” Ben continued. He plucked at sparks as if they were insects. “Once that was me. Throwing my net in the air. Pulling the stories from the wind.”
Nathan Lee didn’t say anything. He let Ben draw himself out. It was him who had searched Nathan Lee out, for some reason.
“I used to gather stories, too,” he said. “From men like these.”
“Our poor brothers?” said Nathan Lee.
Ben’s eyes glittered. “Damned men,” he said. “Men on their trees.”
The crucifix.
“At the age of fifteen, I left my family to go wandering,” said Ben. “You know how young men are. Full of questions. Impatient for the world.”
“Ask him,” Nathan Lee said in English. “Where did he go?” Time to bring Izzy into the loop. He didn’t want to miss the story.
