7th Sigma

by Steven Gould

  “Ohhhhhhh,” he said, in a quiet voice. He squatted on his heels, still out of arm’s reach. “That was back in Golondrinas. The kids’ class was free if you did dojo chores. They taught karate and judo and aikido.”

  “The same teacher?”

  “Oh, no. It was a cooperative. There were four different styles of karate. There were two judo instructors, but just one old guy who taught aikido.”

  “Old guy?” She stared at him. “Which classes did you take?”

  “Aikido, of course.”

  “Of course? Is that what all the kids took?”

  Kimble shook his head. “Oh, no. If they were the wrestling type, they liked judo. Otherwise, they all wanted to take karate. Punch, kick, punch, kick, and more kicking.”

  “So … why aikido?”

  “They were the kids who weren’t that interested in kicking and punching.” Kimble looked down at the dirt. “I got enough of that at home. Besides, once I got the hang of getting off the line, aikido worked pretty well against the kickers and punchers.”

  Ruth was silent for a moment, then said. “I am building a dojo on the Rio Puerco.”

  “Oh. Really? You teach aikido?”

  “For over twenty years now.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “So you already had a dojo. Why did you leave?”

  She sighed. “Divorce. You know what that is?”

  Kimble glared at her.

  “Sorry, of course you do. My ex-husband and his new wife kept the dojo. I left. I left … everything. I’m starting over.”

  Kimble narrowed his eyes. She looked back at him, very still, like a rock, like a predator, like a statue.

  “You’ll need students,” Kimble finally said. “You can’t be a teacher without students. I mean, at least one.”

  She nodded. “Get your things.”

  “Yes, Ms. Monroe.”

  “Sensei,” she said gently.

  “Yes, Sensei.”

  2

  Walking to Cold Dog

  “What should I do, Sensei?”

  Ruth dropped the handles of the travois and said, “Ah, that is always the question, isn’t it?”

  It was their second day on the road, and they’d walked twenty miles since dawn. For Ruth, who’d walked 500 miles in the last six weeks, it was just another longish day, but Kimble’s feet, his legs, his entire body hurt. Ruth had chosen a cluster of cottonwoods on the barest rivulet of a stream to camp.

  “I could gather firewood.”

  “I’ll bet you could.”

  “Sensei, just tell me!”

  Ruth smiled. “Ah, I’m too lazy for that.”

  Kimble frowned, tired, cranky, and confused. “Right, then. I’ll just go get some firewood.”

  When he returned with a respectable bundle of deadfall branches, Ruth was setting up her foam-ceramic stove. The collapsible bucket was sitting beside the travois, empty.

  Kimble looked at the bucket and then at Ruth. “Uh, Sensei, should I—”

  She looked at him and raised her eyebrows.

  “Never mind, Sensei.” He took the bucket to the streamlet, finding a place where the water ran across a rock and dropped down a foot. He propped the bucket there, letting it fill slowly. When he brought the filled bucket back, she thanked him politely.

  That night, before bed, she said, “The trouble with telling someone to do this and to do that is that once you’ve issued orders on that subject, they’ll always expect you to do so. They lose initiative and you end up doing the thinking for two.” She paused. When he did not say anything, she added, “If you do not understand, I will explain further.”

  He shook his head in the dark. “I understand, Sensei.”

  “Good. Now go brush your teeth.”

  He snorted, “But you just said—”

  “Yes. What’s the last thing I ‘told’ you?”

  It had been the night before, their first on the road. “Don’t drink water that hasn’t been boiled, treated, or filtered. Not if you can help it. Not unless you’re dying of thirst.”

  “Good. Now go brush your teeth.”

  * * *

  IN the middle of the morning it was Kimble who issued an order: “Down, Sensei!” He grabbed the wheel of the travois and jumped to the slight ditch on the high side of the road, where it tucked into the hillside, and crouched.

  Ruth pulled the handles over and joined him, swiveling her head around, looking for the danger. “What are we—”

  The first bug zoomed up the road, then another, and Ruth pulled herself into a ball beside the travois. Then they heard the yelling and pounding feet, and even more bugs buzzed through the air, about three feet off the ground. A figure rounded the bend, a man, and he was yelling, “Get it off! Get it off!” He was reaching behind him, one arm high, one arm low, trying to reach something on his back.

  “Grab him!” Kimble said, issuing his second order.

  Ruth snagged the man’s feet, tripping him, and he slammed down hard. His yelling stopped as the breath left him. Kimble scrambled forward on all fours and together they pulled the man back to the ditch.

  His back was covered in blood.

  Kimble grabbed the man’s t-shirt collar with both hands and ripped it down the back.

  There was blood pouring out of a hole to the left of the man’s spine, just below his shoulder blade. Ruth slapped her palm across it, pressing it to stop the bleeding, but Kimble said, “No. Gotta get the bug.” He shoved her hand aside and reached his thumb and forefinger down into the hole.

  The man screamed and thrashed. Kimble’s finger and thumb were a good two inches below the skin. “Ah, ah, dammit! I felt it, but it’s too deep.”

  The man yelled, then screamed and coughed. Blood fountained from his mouth, astonishingly red. His entire body convulsed once, twice, and then he went slack.

  Ruth turned him on his back. “CPR!” She tilted his head back to clear his airway but his throat was full of blood. “Oh, God, oh God.” She felt for a pulse on his neck. There was nothing.

  “Look out, Sensei,” Kimble said.

  Ruth turned her head, looking around.

  “Not out there. That bug is going to come out of him somewhere.”

  Ruth pulled her hands back, almost flinching away.

  There was less blood when it came out of his chest, but the blind black snout of the june-bug-sized creature came right through the remnants of the shirt as if it weren’t there. It crawled up and out, wet and red. It stood up high on its legs and spread its wings. It buzzed them and the blood splattered off in a pink mist. Then it lifted off and Ruth threw herself back as it passed over her and flew back the way it had come.

  “Huh,” said Kimble. He pointed at the shirt. The shape of the bug was outlined in droplets of blood, as if someone had spray-painted over the bug while it sat on the shirt. He looked at his own outstretched finger, then at both hands, covered in blood.

  “Yuck.”

  They moved away from the body, still clinging to the bank of the road. There were other bugs in the air and the body was still in the ditch, a potent reminder of the need for caution. Ruth broke out her emergency reserve of water and a bar of soap and they scrubbed until it hurt.

  “I wonder if he was traveling alone,” Kimble said.

  Ruth stared at him. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure. I just touched the tail end before it dropped into the lung cavity. That’s not the business end.”

  Ruth blinked. “I wasn’t talking about your fingers. You ever see someone die before?”

  “I did, yeah. My mom. Pneumonia. Saw bugs swarm a shepherd. Also a stabbing—a gang thing—back in the capital.”

  “Are you upset?”

  Kimble shrugged. “Not right now. I get nightmares sometimes.” He looked away. “What should we do with the body?”

  Bodies, actually. After another half hour, the bugs settled down and Ruth and Kimble scouted ahead, leaving the travois in the ditch. The other man was lying in the middle o
f the road. He’d bled so much, the blood had eroded a path across the road’s surface and into the ditch. Flies buzzed on the blood-soaked ground. Kimble counted five different bug holes in the man, including one in his forehead.

  “Look,” he pointed at a spot in the road a few yards away from the body.

  “Those bugs?”

  A dozen bugs clustered around a spot in the road. They were jostling each other as they all strove to reach something in the middle.

  “Yeah. They’re eating the broken one. The bug these guys stepped on.”

  “And started the swarm.”

  “And started the swarm.” Kimble rubbed his upper right arm through the cloth of his shirt.

  They covered the bodies using blankets from the men’s own packs, which they had flung aside in the initial panic. According to Ruth’s map, there was another village just two miles ahead. “We’ll report it there,” she said.

  It was only a few houses clustered around a store and some surrounding farms. “You could’ve just buried them,” said the storekeeper, examining the Oklahoma driver’s licenses Ruth had brought from the bodies. “Driver’s licenses. Ha! What they gonna drive?”

  “What about their families? Won’t they want the bodies?”

  The storekeeper eyed Ruth. “New to the territory?”

  Ruth nodded once. “Six weeks.”

  “We don’t got no refrigeration. In winter you could get away with hauling bodies all the way to the border, but this time of the year you just want to get them into the ground as soon as possible.”

  He took Ruth’s name and direction and said, “We’ll get someone out there with a spade. You say they had stuff?”

  “Backpacks. I put them in the bushes near where they lay.”

  The storekeeper brightened. “Good thought to hide them. It might be worth someone’s while to go out and give them a Christian burial.”

  “Oh,” said Kimble. “Is that what a Christian burial is? One with a profit?”

  The storekeeper gave Kimble a dark look. “This isn’t some vacation destination. They can’t come into the territory without seeing that film. They had to sign the release before they were allowed in.” He looked at Ruth. “They’re still doing that, right?”

  Ruth nodded. “Yes. At Needles, at least.”

  Kimble started to open his mouth again, but Ruth grabbed him by the collar and said good-bye.

  Outside she said, “Why are you giving him such a hard time? Don’t you want those bodies buried?”

  Kimble ducked his head. “Sorry. It was that Christian thing. What about ‘Christian duty’? They would preach something awful at the shelters. Some of them really meant it, but some of them would spout scripture then prey on the homeless girls. Let us ‘prey,’” he said, holding his hands like claws.

  She nodded. “I can see that. I don’t care what people believe, myself. I care how they behave. Sometimes their beliefs are part of that, right? Let’s make tracks.”

  * * *

  THAT night they camped on the Rio Puerco, where the road crossed the river and merged with the River Road. A store and an inn were tucked above the bosque. Ruth talked to the clerk at the inn but shook her head at the prices. Several others had also found it too dear and were camped below in the bosque.

  They found a spot to unroll their blankets and eat supper. As it got dark, they joined the group sitting around a campfire where the river had washed the sandy bank clean of foliage.

  The Munn family, an Anglo couple with two kids, were headed for the capital to shop. Mr. Herbert was an older black man returning from the capital after a yearly physical. Honovi and Cha’risi were Hopi freighters, resting on the east–west run to Arizona. And there were Andrea and Samantha, two “sisters” who looked nothing alike and sat with their shoulders touching. The Reverend Torrance was a Baptist missionary from Alabama.

  Kimble ended up telling about the two dead men from Oklahoma. Mr. Herbert raised his head. “I passed them, I think, while they were still alive, of course. They were walking, right? I was on my horse. They were headed south. Sad.”

  The Reverend Torrance bowed his head and clasped his hands together. “May God Almighty take them into his keeping and bring them into the glory of his presence.”

  Mrs. Munn said, “Amen.”

  Ruth said, “I’ve only been in the territory for six weeks, but it surprised me. Do you see that often?”

  “Not as much, these days,” said Mr. Herbert. “Not like it was during the Exodus.”

  Honovi, one of the Hopi freighters, shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. Most drove out, of course, in the first weeks, while the cars were still working. The Air Force dropped those leaflets after the power went.”

  Mr. Munn, father of the two kids, nodded. “I’ve got a whole stack of those on my bookshelf.”

  Mr. Herbert said, “Once the bugs started eating cars, though, that’s when things got bad.”

  “Where’d you live?” Mr. Munn asked. “When it happened.”

  “I was outside, stationed at Fort Carson, First Battalion, 67th Armor. Hoo-ah.” He smiled to himself. “It was Captain Herbert, then. We came south in all our mechanized glory and we destroyed bugs by the thousands. I will say this, we probably saved a lot of lives, ’cause the millions of bugs that came for us left the adjoining territory clear.” The faint smile dropped off his face. “We lost over six hundred men and all our vehicles and weapons.”

  The other Hopi freighter, Cha’risi, said, “I was at the University of New Mexico then. I remember the helicopters falling out of the sky. The few that made it back went high quickly but it was a gamble. Sure, the bugs couldn’t reach you but any bugs that had attached themselves lower down went for the electrical systems and it was a toss-up whether you’d lose an instrument or the engines. I got out into the west face of the Sandias. Took one of the trails. Eventually, the National Guard found me. The stripped down version of the guard. No weapons, no metal. They walked in supplied by air drops.”

  “Why’d they stop, Daddy?” asked Mr. Munn’s daughter. “Why didn’t they just eat all the metal in the world?”

  Three people spoke at once.

  “The barrier,” said her father.

  “The sunlight,” said one of the sisters, Samantha.

  “The army,” said Honovi.

  Then Mr. Herbert said, “Bullshit.”

  They all looked at him and he went on. “I’ve heard all of those but I’ve seen the barrier. The bugs don’t go anywhere near it. And there’s as much sunlight in southern Utah as in Arizona and New Mexico. Sure they seem to be solar-powered but they’re not spreading everywhere there’s good sun. And I was there, son. The army didn’t stop them. We could destroy bugs, sure, but it just brought more. Once the bugs are on your own equipment, what are you gonna do? Shoot at your own tanks?”

  He shook his head and knocked on his thigh, a hard rapping sound, knuckles on plastic. “My battalion’s intelligence officer visited me in the hospital before my discharge. The bugs had stopped spreading over more territory. Even then they didn’t know why the bugs stopped where they did.”

  The other sister, Andrea, asked, “I heard they came out of the lab, at Sandia. They were designed to clean up toxic and radioactive waste, but they got out of hand.”

  Mr. Munn said, “Heard something similar, but that it was from the labs up at Los Alamos. That the radioactivity caused their instruction set to mutate and we got the uncontrolled replication.”

  “I’ve heard all of those,” said Mr. Herbert. “Also that it was from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant down near Carlsbad or that the aliens seeded them at Roswell in 1947 and it took that long for them to grow.” He shook his head. “I do know this—the original infestation spread from near Socorro. But that’s all I know.”

  “New Mexico Tech?” said the other sister, Samantha. “The full name is the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. That would make more sense. I mean, there’s heavy metal pollution, but a lot of
pollution is organic solvents that the bugs wouldn’t touch. But if they’d been developed for mining—that would make sense.”

  Mr. Herbert shrugged. “There’s no record of that kind of research. Some nano-technology stuff, sure, and robotics, but not like this.”

  Mrs. Munn said, “Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? This would be big money stuff. You just turn your bugs loose on a deposit and they go mine it, making more bugs and more bugs and when they’re done, they just fly back to you, to be melted down. Company or government that could do that wouldn’t want his competitors to know. Then, when it went wrong, they covered it up, of course. Thousands died. Worse than Bhopal.”

  The Reverend Torrance said, “You’re overlooking another possibility.” His eyes shifted sideways to the “sisters” and back to the fire. “God, who created the world, who washed it in the flood, who burned Sodom and Gomorrah with fire, is visiting his wrath on our country in particular as we stray from the path of righteousness.”

  “God is certainly visiting a pestilence upon us in you,” Kimble muttered, but only Ruth heard him and he shut his mouth at her glare.

  Mr. Herbert shifted his artificial leg and stood. “The only thing worse than discussing politics with strangers is arguing religion. I’m turning in.”

  Andrea grinned at the Reverend Torrance. “I’m for bed, too.” She looked back at Mrs. Munn. “Once you allege cover-ups and the machinations of the powerful, there’s no proving anything. ‘Evidence has been suppressed.’ I will say this, though; we’ve been studying them for a couple of decades now and we’re no closer to duplicating them.”

  Mrs. Munn said, “That you know.”

  Andrea laughed. Mr. Herbert just shook his head and limped off into the night, followed soon after by everyone else but the family Munn, whose fire it was.

  Later, after brushing his teeth without being told, Kimble asked Ruth, “What do you think?”

  She shook her head. “Insufficient data. Don’t think it’s God punishing us. Seriously doubt Mrs. Munn’s vast conspiracy.” She turned back her bedroll and sat on it. “But after seeing that man die today … well, I’m imagining that times thirty thousand.” She shook her head. “History. It has a distancing effect, doesn’t it?”