PROLOGUE

 

January 15, 2084

Where were her kids?

She wanted Cassie and Billy to see their father for breakfast when he woke up.  He’d been commuting to Hong Kong and who knew what other places trying to drum up investments for their stricken area of New York State. In the kitchen, she cracked two eggs into a pan with butter and sank two pieces of rye bread into the toaster.  She saw through the window that the latticework of ice on the Hudson River was hatcheted apart in last night’s rainstorm.  Her two children went out to play on the riverbank.

She heard a scream.  She ran to the back door.  The nine and eleven year olds in their parkas came bounding up the back lawn, what looked like ruptured earth pounded overnight then re-frozen.  Cassie was wailing.  Billy struggled to keep up with his older sister.

“Mommy!” her daughter cried.

She knelt to grab Cassie’s shoulder at the door as Cassie puckered her face with disgust and held out her hands.  In her mittens sat what appeared to be drenched black human hair.  It was threaded through the eye sockets of a human skull.

She phoned the police.  In minutes, she observed a two-man gyrocopter descend on the riverbank.  On the street, a baby-faced cop waved away a news van from their home.  Four-fifths of this block had moved away in the last year anyway, and the houses around them stood abandoned, dingy and unsellable.  She watched police officers trudging from the scene in front of her house.  A ravaged-looking, old woman in a doorway across the street seemed to snap emotionally.  She shrieked hysterically and wouldn’t stop.  Another breakdown.  Everything was dreadful.

The young mother watched as the cops carried something they dredged from the Hudson.  She spotted three skeletal fingers, like two were chewed off, which hung twig-like from the hammock.  Snagged on a bone was a golden bracelet with a cursive letter “M.”  It looked expensive, she thought.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Four days earlier, nearby:

The first thing he noticed was that there were no trees on his block, as though it had been bulldozed and repaved.  Hadn’t there been trees?  Jonathan Kelton gazed at this through eyes that weren’t real.  He emerged from the car to view his three-story house, a dirty aquamarine stucco.  Dr. Oskar Rose lifted him from the car.  The doctor’s shaved head gleamed in the late afternoon half-light.  Rolls of fat rippled over a leather belt, sleeves of his white shirt rolled, cobalt blue tie loose; eyes dark and inscrutable.  “Home,” the doctor said.

Diana ran out the front door.   A head shorter than he was and two years younger, round-faced and bright-eyed, she looked immaculately coiffed, ready to greet him, her natural strawberry-blond hair dropping to her shoulders in ringlets.  She kissed him and he saw that her hand shook.  A freckle-faced boy peeked out of the doorway then ran to him.  He dropped to a squatting position to take the boy in his arms.  Dr. Rose muttered a few words to Diana that he couldn’t hear. 

“Daddy,” the boy said, breathless.

“My God, Henry.  You’ve grown up, my little man.” 

Rose gave a wave then vanished into his car wordlessly.  Diana led Jonathan into the house.  Inside, a small banner stretched along the wall proclaiming in crayon, “Welcome back, Daddy.”

Bleary, he tried to act relaxed and clear at least for his son’s sake, as Diana spread out pillows for them to sit on the floor.  Diana said, “So, you know, Henry just turned seven.” 

“Hey, happy birthday!” he said, feeling even more awkward acknowledging something this way that he should have remembered right away.  He caught Henry staring at him, mouth slightly open.  He knew he was emaciated and pale, though otherwise had been reassured he looked somewhat the same as before.  At thirty-eight, he’d maintained a lean physique though now his very bones felt rubbery.  He literally wore new skin.   He looked outside, half-expecting his backyard to be split by a liver-colored gash where his lab used to be.  Now, there was a patio. 

It was then he realized he could barely remember actually working in his lab at all.  Why should that be? 

How broken was he, still?

“I want to hear about everything, buddy,” he said to Henry.  “All about school, everything.  Since I’ve been away.” 

Of the approximate year he was gone, he’d only been fully conscious for the last few weeks.  Diana had been allowed to visit him once, though not Henry, right before he was released.  He’d remained bedridden.  He’d been overjoyed to open his eyes and see her.

Sitting upright, now, he felt dizzy and his whole body ached - a vague, dull ache. 

Diana brought out green tea and Henry’s small, partially eaten chocolate birthday cake.  “You look great,” she told Jonathan.

“Even better, right?”

“Want to see a mirror?”

The last time he’d looked at himself was this morning before leaving the clinic, it was safe.  “Bring it on.”

She left the room and returned with a hand mirror.  “See?”  She placed a finger gently on a cleft in his chin.  “Tender?”

“A little.”  The technology was amazing, he thought, as he gazed into his own blue eyes, the lids, the lashes.  And this despite the fact that the neuroplastic devices they’d sunk into his skull like so many pipes weren’t alive but did have the melding properties of living tissue.   Soon, they’d be part of his body.  The difference was they were durable enough to last a thousand years, his doctor had said, proudly; so, when his body decayed, Jonathan figured his new eyes and ears would be poking curiously through a husk of gristle. 

From his cross-legged position on the floor, Henry said, “Are you good now, Daddy?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Kiddo,” Diana said, sounding anxious, “Maybe Daddy should rest a little.”

“Yeah, I…”  She was right, he was enervated from doing nothing.  

She silently directed Henry to take hold of his arms and lift him as though he couldn’t do it himself.  He pulled away gently to stand straight.  He said, “See?  Don’t sweat it.  A new man.”

His son gave him a kiss before heading to his room.  Not long after, Diana stretched out in their bed.  Her eyes looked strangely backlit now, he thought, the iris with almost a neon glow.  Whatever she’d taken made her more relaxed.  He wouldn’t bring it up now.  Things were OK.  All he had to do was get more mentally acute, he told himself. 

“You look beautiful as ever,” he said, meaning it, or wanting to mean it. 

She beamed.

“Diana?… I think I’m having trouble remembering things.”

“What do you mean?  You know us, you know your home, you know everything.”

“No.  I don’t know what happened to me.” 

He knew he’d been working on ordinary commercial chemical pesticides.  He’d been credited with the first fool proof mosquito repellent to be taken internally.  He built the home lab to refine the formula on commission so it could fight off all the stinger-equipped members of the insect population.  His doctor acknowledged that there had been a mistake he made while working but Jonathan couldn’t pinpoint it in his own mind.  His most current records were destroyed in the sudden incineration of his lab so no one could say for sure what it was.  There were volatile substances there that could be used for insect eradication.  So why had no cause of the fire been determined?  The debris was quickly cleared away and no one probed for a specific chemical signature, he’d been told.  His body had absorbed different noxious substances.  The priority, the only concern, they told him, was saving him.  Dr. Rose didn’t want him to think about it.  Dr. Rose didn’t give him any answers.

He might have to be satisfied that all he could know right now was that if he’d remained in the wreckage of the lab any longer, his body would not have been salvageable.  Rose stepped in to claim his blind earthworm form.  He knew that the doctor persuaded Diana to sign papers that allowed procedures for which his newly formed department at the Bluestone Clinic would absorb the cost. 

“Does that even matter, Jon?” Diana asked.

“Why would you say that?”

“Why would I say that?  Because I’m your wife who’s glad you’re home in one piece.”

“But -  what’d I do?”

“Well… You barely talked to me about your work.”

“Then - I wish to God I had.”

“At that time, we weren’t talking too much.”

“What?  Were we fighting?  Over what?”

“No, not fighting.  There was just some, maybe… distance.” 

“Well, then… Couldn’t have been important if I can’t remember.”  He tried to make this sound light-hearted though it wasn’t.

She said, “Be with Henry tomorrow after school, he needs that.”

“Of course, of course.  I want to… That was a little rough I guess, just now, sorry.”

“No.  You just have to become acclimated, the doctor said that… I did some things to the house.  Hope you like them.”

“I will, I’m sure.”  But he couldn’t be sure he would know the difference.  Didn’t she realize that was what he was trying to tell her? 

What he understood at this point -  continuing a mental list of what he did know - was that the barrier between his lab and the house had stood in place.  It was why the fire hadn’t spread; why their home wasn’t harmed.

He said, “Anyway, something must’ve happened out here while I was inside the clinic.  When we were driving here, everything seemed just… dead, no flora at all.  Rose didn’t give me access to news either.”

“Maybe tomorrow or the next day you can look at the news.  That’ll tell you things.  Nothing to worry about now.”

“I worry about not knowing.”

She stared at the ceiling and smiled.  “Well, that sounds like the same old Jonathan.”

“I know it’ll go away but right now I don’t like this feeling of  - of, you know, disarrangement.”

She sighed.  “You’re impossible.”

“Well?”

“Everything’s all right now… Some jerk set off an eco-bomb.”

“Eco-bomb!   I…”  He didn’t know where to begin with that.  “Who, do they know?”

“A local kid, unemployed… Used to be a science student.”

“Where?”

“Actually, from Kingston.”

She meant the State University there - his own college.  “You’re kidding.”

She caressed his cheek.  “Yes, you married me for my sense of humor… You are thinking too much.”

“Tell me when.”

“When?  Last year.”

“Just to make sure,” he said, only half-joking, “the year is 2084?”

“You don’t have to keep second guessing things.  It’s January 11.”

“Diana… please let me know everything.  I can’t relax until I do.”

She sighed again and tapped a keypad by the bed.  The wall screen lit up and indeed told him things he could barely stand to hear.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

Images of a cornfield dewy in morning haze shifted back and forth in wide pans.  Someone was walking briskly down an empty country road wearing an “eyebeam,” a corneal insert that worked as a camera.  The audience was seeing whatever this person was.  Far off, clouds looked cottony in a windy blue sky.  There was the sound of a distant explosion.  It seemed like the full moon lit up for a second, or like a big, peering eye boring through a cloud.  The person with the eyebeam ran towards this sight to catch it on tape.  When the cloud parted, a small plane roared into view.  But the plane went off in two different directions.  It had blasted in two.  The cockpit half did a somersault and plunged in a downward loop then vanished from view.  Only the rapid breath of the person with the eyebeam could be heard and vague mutterings of shock. 

Quiet descended over the cornstalks.  A man darted breathlessly out from this field from the other side.  He was a farm laborer, weathered and middle-aged. 

“The hell was that?” eyebeam-man asked, unseen from behind the camera.

“I don’t know,” the farmhand answered.  He looked into the robotic eye that captured his image then back at the horizon.

Eyebeam-man said, “I heard a weird noise, that plane was flyin’ too low.  No planes around here.  Never.”

Silence between them for a moment, only the arrhythmia of their breathing.

“That guy in the plane did some shit,” the other man said.

“What do you mean?”

“Somethin’.”

“Blew himself up is what.”

“Fuck no, somethin’.  Somethin’ came outta the back of the plane.”  This man’s craggy face seemed to freeze, stone-like.

“How you feelin’, chief?” eyebeam-man asked.

“All right,” he said.  Then, spastically, “Yeah, I, all right…”

The farm guy bent forward and retched.  Blood gushed from his mouth and panicked eyebeam-man didn’t know where to look, his gaze shooting up and down.  It came to rest on what looked like a rancid, pulpy tomato on the asphalt.   It looked like the man vomited up half of his stomach.

Then came screams from eyebeam-man with images bouncing up and down as he ran.  A reddish tinge crept into the edges of the video frame.  His own blood.  Until the camera view flipped sideways to stare into the cornfield and just stay there.  Eyebeam-man had collapsed in the road and this was the last thing his living eye saw.

A time lapse occurred.  After this man’s death, the videotape had been speeded up for public viewing.  The reddish images blurred.  The cornstalks shriveled into fleshy sticks, which buckled on top of each other and collapsed.  This happened in a matter of days, before the man’s body was retrieved.  The field that had stood six feet high became a prickly wasteland to the horizon.

This was nine months ago.  This was the birth of “God-zero.”

The lone terrorist attack got its name as analogous to the idea of “ground zero.”  That’s what Jonathan heard on the news replay.  But the site of detonation was in the sky, a mid-air chemical metastasis.  There was no conflagration since it was an airborne bio-toxin.  It was carried on the wind.  To some pundits, it was as if a god sought punishment for mankind’s hubris -  or they thought that was the killer’s intent.  God-zero.  What amounted to a morbidly ironic name for the event. 

In this news montage, the scene shifted to the Hudson River under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.  It looked like the river had been paved with stones.  These were dead fish.

Diana shut the TV off.  “Enough, OK?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Satisfied?”  She looked at him in bed.  “Now you know about as much as we all do.”

After the attack, whole nearby towns were wiped out.  Outlying ones were evacuated, many inhabitants never to return. 

The final death toll:  323,115.

It was James Martinson, age 27, who had set it off over the Hudson Valley.  He seemed to be a science graduate who was rebelling against science, if his actions could be accorded any logic.  He was showing how it could be destructive -  while destroying the modern world at the same time.  In his twisted way, maybe he was a Luddite.  He sent poison raining down by light aircraft.  He killed himself in his plane in the process.  Eventually, his insidious but scattershot creation was mostly contained. 

Jonathan knew that the potential for something like this was one of the reasons counties in New York a decade ago had been combined into Cantons, to consolidate power within decentralized units.  So much for that.  But if Martinson made demands or left a statement or manifesto, government sources snapped it up and it was hidden away.  The information glut of earlier decades had long ended.  Information was power and it was getting harder to come by for everyday people. 

So in the end, really, nobody knew why he did it.

What an extraordinary thing to have happened during the past year, and so close to home, he thought; a time in which he experienced his own personal devastation.

Diana said, “Look, I was only supposed to try to talk about… about positive things.”

“OK, sweetheart.”  She was trying as best she could to make him feel better in this almost impossibly distressed new environment. 

“No more news.  That’s it.  You just got to relax.  All right?” 

“OK.”  In a second, he said, “I love you.”

“Oh, Jon.  I love you too.”

She kissed his cheek and left the room.

In a minute, he caught sight on the dresser of a notebook.  It must have been placed there for him by Diana.  He flipped back the metallic cover.  Pages lay before him with plastic pockets containing washer-sized disks, arranged chronologically, his class records from the University of Kingston.  He slipped disc after disc in a cuticle ridge in the notebook, which projected class lists, grades and written examinations, perusing them quickly.  These seemed mundane.

One particular roster, from the semester before the fire, the last class he’d taught before his sabbatical, compelled him.  He stared at it.  Frustratingly, astonishingly, none of these names meant anything to him. 

He couldn’t think about any of these things now.

Too much.

He dropped heavily into a well of sleep.  But it wasn’t for long.