by Jeff Long
“And you’re saying the clones are responsible?”
“They’re part of it. This sea change in attitude all dates to your yard.”
“That’s hard to believe.” But he felt it himself. The yard inhabited him. The little tribe of clones had conquered death. They had outlived the apocalypse and joined hands. Paradise was now.
“The whole city’s tuned in to you. History and geography teachers are using the tapes to teach children about the customs of first-century Palestine. Classrooms have adopted different clones to research and write their biographies. The lunchrooms and coffee bars are full of the latest revelations. The churches play the Lord’s Prayer.”
Nathan Lee had heard some of that. “Bread and circuses,” he dismissed it.
“Don’t you see? You’re threatening the cure. That’s what Cavendish thinks.”
“It’s just TV. The ultimate reality show.”
“No,” she said. “Cavendish is exactly right.” She picked up a rib from Matthew’s bone set. “You’ve turned them into human beings.”
“They were to begin with.”
“But we didn’t know that,” she said. “That’s the difference. Already two of the labs have suspended experiments because of you. Others are talking. Cavendish understands. They’re trending away from a methodology. They’re self-correcting. Reeling themselves back from the brink.”
“Human testing?” he said. “That’s part of the culture. People made that deal with the devil a long time ago.”
“Which is why this is so dangerous,” she said. “Cavendish is the devil. It started with him.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “It’s part of Los Alamos. I’ve heard about the early days. The bomb years. Back in the fifties, thousands of dead babies were sent here from around the world, to study the spread of radioactive fallout. Scientists used to inject themselves with plutonium. They used to feed it to their own children.”
“That stopped,” she said.
“It set the precedent. How much worse does it get?” Your own child?
“I’m not sure how much you know about what’s going on. Nobody talks about the scale of it.”
“Of what?”
“Do you recall that first day you were here,” she said. “We were walking across the grounds and the ash came down. You made a joke about snow in July.”
Intellectual debris, she had called it. Instantly he grasped the truth of it. He was shocked that it had taken him until this moment. “Human ashes,” he said.
Miranda nodded. “Clones. Carriers from the cities. Even infected scientists. I don’t have the numbers. Thousands,” she said. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve done everything possible to keep them out of our heads. It’s our worst nightmare, you know, that we might turn into Auschwitz.” She handed the rib to him. “Do you see now? You’ve started something. Cavendish is losing support for his methods. He’s running out of time.”
“We’re all running out of time,” he answered. “I’m only helping you pass it.”
“I thought so, too, in the beginning. Like you said, it’s just TV. But it’s become something more. People are waiting for something to happen. They think there’s some kind of answer waiting for them in the yard. And that you’re going to give it to them.”
There were different ways to run with that. He chose to keep it simple. “Clues to the plague? I wouldn’t hold my breath,” he said. “I keep digging. Maybe they know something, maybe they don’t.”
“The clones?” she said. “They don’t have anything to tell us about the plague. Nothing relevant. They’re one more dead end. You know that.”
Nathan Lee pulled his head back. He did know it, or had started to suspect it. None of the clones seemed to know anything about a plague that had not really been a plague two thousand years ago. Their blood analyses suggested a brush with some early form of Corfu, but it must have been a mild spin-off strain, something that had mutated along the Spice Road. Whatever it was that had jumped out of the holy relic in Corfu must have originated at some safe distance from the Holy Lands. The researchers had locked onto the right era, but the wrong reservoir. Golgotha was not the answer.
“What happens now?” he asked. Chin up, he told himself. Eyes wide open. Cavendish had spoken. Nathan Lee was a condemned man. He tried to imagine how to pick up from here. Anymore, all roads led to Los Alamos. Which would he take, where would he go? He felt fattened, sluggish, off course. His momentum had slipped.
“I blocked the deport order.” She shrugged.
He let his breath out. “You can do that?”
“The show goes on,” she answered. “I need you.”
“You want me to keep going with the clones? But you just said they’re a dead end.”
“If you look at a map, so is Los Alamos. But it’s still our last, best hope. And you’re helping keep us together. Up in the light of day.”
Up, he suddenly realized, Out. Out from the darkness of her father’s underworld. That was his use to her. It wasn’t Cavendish she was fighting, but her father. It didn’t seem right, somehow, to use one father against another.
THE CLONES GAINED strength. Their baby fat melted away. They were eager to test their muscles. Foot races sprang into being. They did hand-stands. Men draped arms over one another’s shoulders and danced and sang. A wrestling match on the hard blacktop left the competitors bruised and bloody, but buoyant.
Autumn arrived, and with it cooler weather. The fire became their center. Every night, the Captain had his guards stack more wood in the yard. Every morning the prisoners arrived to find the flames crackling, and they would take up where yesterday had left them.
In the fourth week, Nathan Lee edited his character. His Aramaic was improving. He continued to play a traveler from the mountains north of Babylon, but now he became their scribe. Like a magician, he produced a pen and blank sheets of paper. It was an ingenious trick. In one stroke, he made himself what he already was, their ghostwriter.
Through him, they believed, they could communicate with their families and villages. The fact that Nathan Lee wrote their letters in his own language using a strange alphabet was no more perplexing than the pen of endless ink that he wrote with. They trusted that he must have his ways.
He no longer had to wait for the clones to accidentally interview themselves. Now they stood in line, waiting to pour out their thoughts to him. While Izzy translated, Nathan Lee wrote, and the cameras recorded.
They were utterly present-minded. They knew they had died, but in their minds only a year or two had passed. They missed their families. They worried about how the crops were doing, or if the herds had fattened, and how the children were growing. Those who had been killed during the destruction of Jerusalem anguished over the fate of their loved ones. “Be strong, we’ll soon be joined together,” they dictated to Nathan Lee.
Each tried to describe this unusual land of the afterlife. They called it Sheol, or Tophet or Gehenna…no more of that Egypt business with the iron walls and bronze sky. For them, it was a place of punishment, but also gradual rewards. They stressed the rewards. The sky was very blue, they marveled. The lambs were fat. A forest sent its sweet perfume to them over the walls. One day the walls would fall away, they were sure of it. Everything was going to be better and better. Any minute their loved ones were going to show up.
25
The Horse
OCTOBER
Sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit,” Nathan Lee told the girl as they drove out East Jemez Road. “Winds west by southwest at five miles per hour. Look, not a cloud in the sky. We can’t go wrong today.” He started singing. “I was driving along in my automobile, my baby beside me at the wheel….”
Tara was grinning. She had no idea what he was raving about, but he was happy with her, and she had him for the day. He turned left to go to the old Neutron Science Center. The place had been mothballed years ago. Now it was home to a contingent of Special Forces soldiers. Here the Appaloosa lived
in splendor.
The elite soldiers had adopted her with a passion. They had built a stall for her among the piñons and rabbit brush. She was the Wild West to them, who had grown up in cities and suburbs and never ridden a horse before Nathan Lee brought her. None of the other units had such a glorious mascot. The Marines had various mutts, the SEALS kept fighting cocks. The Appaloosa was unique.
On her behalf, the team medic had taught himself veterinary medicine. The weapons specialists curried her and rigged an enamel bathtub so that she had a constant supply of fresh, running water. They learned which fescues she preferred, stockpiled hay bales for the winter, and—before the valley had been designated off-limits in late August and travel across the Rio was banned—had bartered with ranchers near Taos for enough eighty-pound sacks of oats to feed a cavalry. They regularly swept the field and killed any rattlesnakes. They took turns sleeping in a tent by the stable so that coyotes would not be tempted. In jest they said Nathan Lee would have to fight them to get her back. In jest he said they’d never know until she was gone, he’d be that quiet the night he cut loose of the Mesa. The soldiers liked that. In their minds no one was ever leaving Los Alamos, not unless the cure appeared or the much discussed, near mythic Evacuation Day actually came down.
For Nathan Lee, the Appaloosa was his promise to himself. She was his link backward to a time before this place. He visited sporadically, most often following a night of vivid dreams. In one form or another, the bad dreams always had to do with his daughter. She was calling to him, or her photo on the shelf in the bone lab would show a skull. He would wake sweating and try to be thankful for the nightmares. But they were not strong enough to overcome his good dreams, which were more and more often about Miranda, and the friendships he was making, and the ties he felt binding him. One recurring image was of his feet turning into tree roots that grew into the rocky soil of Los Alamos. He looked up in his dream and his arms would be limbs, and he would be lodged on the edge of a cliff overlooking the valley. As beautiful and peaceful as that was, he would wake from those dreams in a sweat, too.
But the Appaloosa calmed his night fears. Just the sight of her pacified his sense of guilt and betrayal. One day he would leave on her back. He would be true.
Bringing Tara here seemed right all around. It was going on two months since he had first crashed her isolation. Since then, a host of therapists and guardians had been working with the child, guiding her into the company of man. The Captain and his wife were ready to take her into their home, but Tara was not ready to be taken. She was still an unredeemed wild child. Her few exploratory outings into Los Alamos had been small disasters: a tantrum in the market, a screaming fit at the playground, another incident with feces, and other such lapses back into her cage self. As far as Nathan Lee was concerned, her behavior had everything to do with the captivity she had endured since birth. People kept alluding to her Neandertal differences, as if she were impaired or separate, and that stung Nathan Lee. But the fact was that in the midst of one of her fits, Tara was a dangerous little brute, and she didn’t belong mixing with other children in the city, not yet, maybe not ever.
And so, he brought her to the horse. He would have brought the horse to her, in the yard, but she had never been allowed into the yard. For one thing it was occupied by the other clones all day, every day, and the therapists—and Nathan Lee’s instincts—ruled against introducing the girl to the men from Year Zero. They might very well treat her like a little sister, but on the other hand they were walking wounded themselves. At best, the insertion of a female child would probably have stirred expectations that their own womenfolk were about to arrive. At worst, they were crucified men. Nathan Lee was still uncertain about the extent of some of their crimes.
Tara’s visit had been arranged in advance. The Special Forces camp was set on several acres to the east of the abandoned testing facility, and for today’s visit they had tethered the appaloosa in the middle of nowhere, far from any human distraction. No one else was out there.
Nathan Lee and Tara took their time walking out across the warm tan soil. She kept stopping, fascinated by the grasshoppers and ladybugs and rocks. He rubbed sprigs of sagebrush for her to smell. “Look!” she kept saying. He didn’t tell her about the horse. He let her discover the animal herself.
Tara grew very still at the sight of the appaloosa. The horse was browsing clumps of dry grass, her long tail sailing back and forth. They had saddled her. Her mane was groomed. She was beautiful.
“Should we go a little closer?” Nathan Lee asked.
Tara held his hand. She was fearful, the way any child would be, all wide eyes and quiet before the majesty of the giant animal. She clutched her blond Barbie doll in one brown fist.
The appaloosa went on cropping the grass, though her ears swiveled at their approach. They got close.
“Touch her,” Nathan Lee said, running his hands along the white-and-black spotted flanks. Tara laid a fingertip on the muscled bellows of a rib cage. The horse lifted her head to see the small creature, and Tara shied against Nathan Lee.
“She wants to get a look at you,” he said. “She wants to smell you.” The big nostrils flexed and blew. “I think she likes you.”
Tara was speechless.
“Look, you have the same hair,” said Nathan Lee. He raised one forearm through the dirty white mane and let the coarse hair cascade off. Tara worked her fingers through it, awestruck by her connection with the magical beast.
Nathan Lee had brought a treat from the farmer’s market in Los Alamos. People had built greenhouses on the tops of apartment buildings and dug plots in the parks and cleared spaces in the forest. The growing season had been unusually long this year. For the last several weeks, you could trade for peas in the pod, green and red chiles, ears of yellow and Indian corn, round cannonballs of cantaloupe that tasted like wet sugar, squash, heads of lettuce, basil, thyme, onions…and fat sticks of carrots. “Here.”
He helped Tara with the first carrot. Together they offered it to the horse, and she took it with muscular lips. Her big teeth munched it. She nuzzled for more. After that Tara didn’t need his help. Horse and girl, they had found each other.
“Should we ride her a little?”
It was incomprehensible to the child. He might have said let’s fly. Nathan Lee got into the saddle first, then reached down for Tara. Not yet five, and she must have weighed sixty pounds, all muscle.
With his arms around the child, Nathan Lee nudged the horse to motion. The girl was trembling. “Should we stop?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered.
They took a slow loop out to the mesa rim. On the way back, he showed her how to hold the reins. They dismounted. “Would you like a little more?” he said.
“More,” she whispered.
He took the saddle off, and the blanket. He lifted Tara onto the broad, warm back and walked the Appaloosa for miles. At the end of the day, he led her to the Special Forces camp. “Can Tara come ride your horse again?” he asked the soldiers.
Tara was breathless, waiting up there.
One of them came over and stroked the appaloosa. “I think that would be a good idea.” The soldier pretended to talk to the horse. “What do you think?”
Tara’s eyes widened. The animal could speak?
Just then a fly landed on the horse’s nose. The Appaloosa tossed her head up and down. The answer was plain as day. The little girl looked thunderstruck. Nathan Lee let her sit up there for a while longer. That night he dreamed of that happy day.
26
Wolves and Lambs
ONE WEEK LATER
Few of the crucified men talked about the manner of their dying or what came after. Not unnaturally, the threatened citizens of Los Alamos were burning to know about it. They pestered Nathan Lee on the streets, by e-mail or phone, asking him to ask more about that “death thing.” They wanted some glimpse of what it was like, “the king of terrors” as the Bible put it, “a little sleep, a littl
e slumber, a little folding of the hands for sleep.” Nathan Lee dreaded to ask, though. He had passed among the bones. He had heard them whistle.
Over the summer Los Alamos had largely lost touch with America. Information technology had not decayed limb by neat regional limb, as some had predicted. The crash had been catastrophic. One day they had transmissions from St. George and Lincoln and Laramie, frightened talking heads, meandering video tours. The next, their eyes were blind. The transmissions just ceased. There were sporadic bursts from shortwave guerrillas, and the satellites were jam-packed with backdated images and data they had yet to excavate. But it was suddenly like nightfall out there, as if America had plunged into the darkness of Asia and Africa and Europe. Even so, Nathan Lee clung to his hope. He refused to believe silence meant emptiness. People—towns, enclaves, tribes—were in hiding, that was all. There was life out there. And his daughter. Life, that was the question he wanted answers for, not death.
The few times he did ask about the clones’ deaths and what lay beyond, the men would evade answering. “You know as well as me,” they would say. It wasn’t that they’d forgotten. Their faces grew dark. Their eyes smoldered. They remembered, but did not want to. With time, Nathan Lee comprehended that hanging from the cross had been a gruesome humiliation. No matter how much agony they had endured on the cross, it was their memory of the shame that still hurt them most. Naked and reviled, they had been stripped of their reputations, their names, and their lands. Their families had been damned by their deaths, and they knew it. And so they glossed over the dying part.
Nathan Lee was struck by their dignity. As their scribe, he listened to them dictate letters home about their new life, and they generally treated their rebirth as a grand achievement, or a fresh start, a new land, an opportunity. They viewed themselves as pioneers, or at least fellow travelers. Their imprisonment by strange demons was simply part of the journey. It wouldn’t last forever. They acted as if their herds and orchards and businesses were still intact back in the old life. Some went into great detail about how they wanted their wives or brothers or sons to attend to daily affairs in their absence. “Pay no more than three shekels,” one instructed his wife, “and be sure not to speak with Elias. I never trusted his eyes. And whatever you do, don’t invite him here.”
