Year Zero Read Online Free Page A

The ruins did not want to give her up.
    “You can’t change what’s happened,” said Ochs. “We’re in enough danger.” A machine gun rattled in the distance.
    Nathan Lee lifted her fingers on his palm. They were flexible, not entirely cold. He squeezed them gently.
    “Damn it. Feel for a pulse,” said Ochs. “Get this over with.” He reached across and stabbed his fingers against the inner wrist.
    The fingers twitched. The hand clutched Nathan Lee’s. “God,” he barked. He tried to let go. But she held on. Her grip relaxed very slowly. Nathan Lee stared at his hand.
    “A nerve contraction,” Ochs said.
    “How would you know?”
    “Dead frogs do it.” Ochs milked the wrist, and the hand balled and loosened, a puppet with no brains.
    “Stop,” said Nathan Lee. He took her hand again, but this time she didn’t return his grip. He laid his fingers along the wrist. Was that a pulse, or the earth’s vibrations? The warmth, was it a residue of the day? He returned to pulling at the heavy stones. “Help me,” he said.
    “We can’t stay here,” said Ochs. “If the aftershocks don’t kill us, the animals or soldiers will. You’re not going to find your conscience in the dirt, you know.”
    Faraway, a man shrieked. Grieving or gut shot or mad. It stopped suddenly.
    “Go,” said Nathan Lee. “There’s your church. I’ll be here. I won’t leave without you.”
    “I need you down there,” said Ochs. “The trench is deep.”
    What trench? wondered Nathan Lee. Ochs had offered no clues to his prey, other than the name of the Church itself. “Help me then,” he repeated. He strained at another stone.
    “All right,” Ochs said. “But first you help me. We go into the church. Get what we came for. It will take half an hour. After that you can come back here and dig to your heart’s content.” His teeth glittered red and green.
    Nathan Lee balked. “And you’ll help me.”
    “I’ll help. If anyone asks what we have in the body bag, we’ll tell the truth. Human remains.”
    Another clue, thought Nathan Lee. He marked the edge of the depression with a mountaineer’s cairn, rocks stacked on rocks. Then he led Ochs down the rubble to the flat stone courtyard.
    One of the great wooden doors had buckled open. They stepped inside from ruin into relative serenity. Tiles had buckled here and there. Colored glass crunched underfoot. Candles lay toppled and bent. Otherwise the interior appeared to be unscathed.
    It was like walking through a dream among the altars and dark icons lining the walls. The rotunda area was larger than he remembered, but that was because the crowds of pilgrims were absent. Pillars and arches surrounded them. Flare light illuminated the surviving stained glass art. Not a soul occupied this safe haven.
    “What did I tell you,” said Ochs. “All ours.” The quiet interior put him at ease. “The Tomb of Jesus,” he announced, walking to a boxy shape at the center of the rotunda.
    The marble was polished from centuries of fingertips and reverent kisses. Inside the small edifice, Nathan Lee knew, was a tiny gate with a poor view of a rock. As he recalled, the fragment was covered with white and pink wax drippings. Was that Ochs’s souvenir? It would explain the geologist’s hammer and stone chisels. But not the “human remains.”
    “What are we after?” said Nathan Lee. He felt disoriented in this place. Stone staircases led up here, down there. In the beam of his flashlight, metal chandeliers swayed slightly on heavy chains. The earth was still settling.
    Ochs took his time. He crossed to a separate area, and Nathan Lee followed. A horizontal window looked down upon a misshapen boulder.
    “The Rock of Calvary,” Ochs entoned. “Golgotha, in the Aramaic. The cave of Adam’s skull, they say. The hill of Christ’s death.”
    “I’ve had the tour,” said Nathan Lee. The rock was roughly forty feet high, made of cream-colored limestone known as mizzi hilu, or sweet