by Jeff Carlson
“What do you think,” Cam said. “North, right?”
“We have to go north anyway.” Newcombe crouched easily and set his map on the asphalt, moving his glove to the hooked line of pen marks he’d drawn.
Cam bent more slowly, careful of his right knee. Ruth settled down with a thump. She was clearly desperate to rest, but so awkward with her cast. He saw her raise her good hand to her face mask to scratch her bites.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “Look.” East of the city, the American River had been dammed on two sides to form a giant, square-cornered lake. Some part of that huge berm must have given way. Cam covered a section of the map with his glove and said, “If this whole valley is flooded, we’ll actually need to go west to work around it. That could take forever.”
“North was our direction,” Newcombe said.
“Cam knows the area,” Ruth said, and he was glad.
It was childish, but he was glad. He said, “We don’t want to be down here any longer than we have to.”
“We stay north,” Newcombe said, drawing his finger south across one short inch of map. “The other guys must be around here, maybe a little farther. It’s just not smart to bunch up and make it any easier to find us.”
Cam only nodded, sifting through his doubt.
There had been two more people with them in downtown Sacramento, Captain Young and Todd Brayton, another scientist like Ruth. The division was obvious. It meant a better chance that someone would reach elevation with the vaccine, so they had angled away from each other as quickly as possible. But they faced another problem. By the second day, Newcombe became certain that Leadville had established a forward base in the Sierras, probably straight east of Sacramento. There was no other way they could mount so many helicopter searches. The range from Colorado was too far.
Avoiding that base meant a detour either farther north or back south again, and Cam didn’t think Ruth had the extra miles in her. Maybe not him, either. Newcombe didn’t see that. Newcombe was too strong, whereas Cam knew very well how an injury could change and limit everything about a person. Mood. Imagination.
He admired her. She was tougher than anyone would have guessed, but the truth was that the two of them were a ragtag disaster, Cam with body-wide damage from old nano infections and his left hand thickly bandaged after a knife wound sustained during the fight in Sacramento, Ruth with her busted arm—and until just sixteen days ago, she had been the centerpiece of a crash nanotech program aboard the International Space Station for over a year, losing bone and muscle mass despite a special diet, vitamins, and exercise.
She tired easily, which had been holding them back. They were still barely twelve miles from where they’d started, although they must have covered twenty or more. Their path had been a back-and-forth zigzag through the jammed streets and bugs and other hazards. Cam estimated their total hike to be a matter of weeks, not days.
It should get better. In theory, Leadville’s search grids would grow too big and they could spend less time hiding. Ruth pushed herself mercilessly. She knew she was the weak link. And yet if she dropped from exhaustion or developed a fever or something, Cam honestly didn’t think they could carry her. He shared her impatience, but it was important for her to get the rest she needed, no matter if that increased other dangers. Newcombe only encouraged her, though, with all the best reasons in mind, and Ruth was too driven to say no. It had to be Cam who protected her.
“What if we find a boat,” he said. “A motorboat. Every other guy around here was a fisherman or something. We could cut straight across or even go upriver.”
“Mm.” Newcombe turned and Cam followed his gaze to the submerged homes and wreckage.
“We have to try,” Cam said, rising to his feet. His back hurt and he had ant bites down his neck and shoulders, a pinched nerve in his hand, but he bent to help Ruth anyway.
* * * *
They fell into a familiar rhythm, Cam in front, single file with Ruth between him and Newcombe. They went south, drifting back the way they’d come but off the highway.
The new shore was fickle. In places the water stretched inland, filling the streets—and everywhere the houses and fences were a problem. They wanted to look into yards and garages, but each neighborhood was its own trap, either dead-ending in the water or choked with debris from the larger flood or both. Several times Cam dodged around fields of spiderwebs. Once he saw ants. Everything took time. They needed food and cautiously entered a house that looked normal except for the dry band of muck wrapped around its foundation. They wanted to siphon gas into a few extra canteens and Ruth immediately sat down as Newcombe stopped beside a small Honda, shrugging out of his pack.
“You okay?” he asked.
Ruth bobbed her head, but Cam wondered what she looked like behind her goggles and mask. Her twisted posture wasn’t right.
“I haven’t seen any reptiles,” she said. Typical Ruth. Sometimes it was hard to know what she was thinking, only that she’d definitely latched on to something.
“Me either,” Cam said.
“But you did in the mountains,” Ruth said.
“Yes. Not at the top, but we saw way too many snakes and whole fields full of lizards at eight thousand feet. Seven. Six.” That was as far down as he’d gone. “They were definitely below the barrier.”
“Maybe the ants are attacking their eggs,” she said. “Or their hatchlings. The bugs might be getting to their young before they’re big enough to fight.”
“I can’t figure out why there’s anything alive down here at all,” Newcombe said.
“They don’t get as hot as people,” Cam said.
“But they do,” Ruth said. “Sometimes hotter. Cold-blooded things aren’t actually cold. They just don’t generate their own body heat, except from running or flying. Basking in the sun. They can be very precise. I think most reptiles keep themselves between seventy and eighty degrees, but insects are usually about the same temperature as the environment.”
Cam nodded slowly. The machine plague operated on a heat engine. When it hit ninety degrees, it activated. And yet in his experience, the plague took as long as two or three hours to power up after it was absorbed into a host. At midday, in summer, the nanotech might begin to decimate the bugs—but as the day cooled, so would these creatures. Obviously enough of them had survived, and they would breed uncontested in autumn, winter, and spring.
Fish and amphibians were safe in rivers and lakes. He’d seen it himself. They remained below the critical threshold, and at altitude it was the same. Lower temperatures protected the reptiles and insects in the foothills and mountains. They must have continually repopulated the world below in haphazard migrations.
“My guess is they’re always on the edge of disaster down here,” Ruth said, “but it makes me wonder if the whales might have survived. Dolphins and seals.” She shook her head. “We looked sometimes. Up in the space station, I mean. They’re insulated in a lot of fat, but if they stayed cold enough... maybe way up in the Artic or down at the South Pole...”
It was a nice thought. “I hope so,” Cam said, trying to encourage her.
Then he leaned back to stare past the houses. Cam had grown accustomed to the feeling of being watched, surrounded by empty dark windows and ghosts, but this was different. A noise. The dead had mostly settled long ago, but rot and imbalance were always itching away at things. Buildings shifted. Garbage moved. And yet his subconscious had pulled this one sound out of the soft whispering all around them, a low, distant sound like the breeze, even though the late morning sky was clear and still.
“Hey,” he said.
Newcombe looked up from the Honda. “What?”
The noise reminded Cam of the storm winds in the mountains, but there was no wind here and the rising shhhhhhhhhh seemed localized. He turned to follow it, afraid now. It was very big, he realized, somewhere north of them. The environment had changed so drastically, the land stripped and baking, was it possible
that some temperature differential between this muddy sea and the dead earth was causing tornados?
“Oh God,” Ruth said, just as Cam finally recognized the echoing drone way out across the water.
Fighter jets.
* * * *
They holed up inside a sewer drain, musty but dry, crowding in one after another. Newcombe thought the concrete box and the dirt-pack above it would conceal them from airborne sensors—and as the jets swept back again, crisscrossing the sky, he said they might as well settle in. Their allies in Colorado had transmitted bad commands to all of the U.S. spy satellites under Leadville’s control, causing those eyes to tumble and burn down through the atmosphere, but Leadville still had a thermal imaging sat which would pass overhead twice during the next two hours... unless they’d moved it.
Hiding from the sky was complicated. Leadville might have used some of the satellite’s fuel reserves to alter its orbit and its timing, and spy planes could pass so far overhead as to be invisible. The space station was still up there, too. Even uninhabited, the ISS made a fine satellite with its cameras operated remotely from Colorado. Newcombe didn’t have good intelligence on what its last orbital path had been.
They could only work with what they knew. That was one reason they got moving so early every day, to gain a few miles before finding cover again. In his systematic way, Newcombe had even taken five watches from a store, still ticking perfectly. He kept three for extras in his pack and wore the other two— two for safety—having set both alarms to give them at least thirty minutes to look for a place to hide before the thermal satellite passed overhead. The bugs also seemed worse in the afternoon, mindlessly responding to the same heat that made them vulnerable to the plague, so it wasn’t a bad time to go to ground. They always needed to eat, reorganize, and nap.
First they emptied a pint of gasoline over the street above them, trying to cover their smell. Then they shared five cans of greasy uncooked soup and it was good beyond words, rich in fat and sodium. Cam’s stomach cramped. He ate too much too fast, dragging his mask down to gulp straight from the can, but slowly that knot relaxed as his body sang with new energy. Unfortunately all they’d found to drink were stale, odd-tasting boxes of juice, and they were leery of the water, certain it was teeming with bacteria and common household toxins like weed spray, detergents, and motor oil. Boiling it would at least kill any parasites, but they couldn’t risk a fire.
“Insects don’t have hemoglobin, either,” Ruth said, resuming their conversation from before. She was tenacious if nothing else, and Cam smiled to himself.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“They don’t have iron in their blood like we do, and the plague uses both carbon and iron to build more of itself. That could give them a little more protection. It might confuse the nanotech.” Her good hand shrunk into a fist. “Places that get hotter than this must have been absolutely wiped out, though, Arizona and New Mexico and Texas. Large parts of the South.”
“Yeah.” Cam thought of Asia and Africa, too, and everywhere along the equator. In jungles, the air would be hot and thick, which might increase the odds that bugs and reptiles would be susceptible to the plague.
There was nothing they could do about it. Ruth was still taking on more than she could handle, he thought. Or maybe she was only using the problem to distract herself.
The two jets crossed back again, trailing great wakes of sound. Newcombe identified the aircraft as F-22 Raptors and wrote briefly in his journal, one of several little notepads he’d picked up. He expected to have to account for himself, providing a report of everything they’d seen and done, and Cam appreciated the man’s confidence more than he could say.
Ruth was already drowsing. “I’ll keep watch,” Cam said, and Newcombe lay down to sleep.
Cam felt surprisingly good. He was hurt, worn down, tense, and filthy, but also full of purpose and self-worth. Companionship. Yes, they squabbled constantly, but it was for the best, everyone contributing. The redemption he needed was here with these two. He believed in what they were doing.
Still, it was damned odd. They were so dependent on each other. Day-to-day their survival was an intimate experience, demanding cooperation and trust, and yet the three of them were hardly more than strangers. There had never been time for more than a few words here and there, always on the run. Cam hadn’t even seen their faces for days. He only knew them by their actions.
Newcombe. The man was smart and powerful, with stamina to spare, but his pack was the heaviest and he’d already hiked twice as far as Ruth and Cam, ranging outward to set their bug traps. He had also suffered the most yesterday. He was peppered with bites, and Cam wanted him to nap because Cam needed him to stay sharp. It troubled him that their dynamic was uneasy. Newcombe was an elite and a combat vet. A sergeant. He naturally expected to take charge of two civilians, and yet Cam and Ruth each had their own authority.
Ruth. Cam turned to look and found her curled up against her pack like a little girl. His gaze lingered.
She was completely out of her element. Her power was in her intellect but she was changing, he knew, becoming more physical and more aggressive. Becoming ever more attractive. What he remembered most were her dark eyes and curly hair. Ruth was not what anyone would consider gorgeous, but she was trim and healthy and genuine.
He didn’t understand her guilt. Nothing that had happened was her fault, and the work she’d done was miraculous, and yet she clearly felt she was lacking. That was something else they shared—something else that set them apart from Newcombe. Newcombe had never failed. Yes, their takeover at the lab had ended in a bloodbath with five of his squadmates killed, but Newcombe had reacted as well as possible to every obstacle. None of the mistakes were his. He simply wasn’t hurt as deeply as the two of them. It was an awkward bond, but it was there.
Cam looked away from her and a brown spider fled from his movement, scurrying across the concrete. He crushed it. He watched the ruins and the gossamer webs, fighting inside himself for quiet.
He had learned to contain feelings like hunger and fear, but Ruth was something else. Ruth was warm and bright, and Cam was too starved for anything positive. He was too aware of what they could achieve together. The potential for improving the nanotech, the potential for new uses, was both stunning and dark. There was far more at stake than their own lives.
The world they knew was dying. Today was May 19th, and yet they’d seen very little new spring growth and not a single flower, not even resilient weeds like poppies or dandelions. The grasshoppers, ants, and beetles were devastating, but a lot of plants appeared to be wilting or extinct simply because they’d gone unpollinated. There didn’t seem to be any bees left, or butterflies or moths, and it was the same in the mountains.
If they were successful, if humankind ever reclaimed the world below ten thousand feet, it would be a long struggle to survive as the environment continued to fall apart. Generations from now, their grandchildren would still be waging war against the bugs and sterile deserts and floods, unless they developed new nano tools—machines to fight and machines to build. Ruth had said that wasn’t at all impossible, and Cam realized he was watching her again when he should be looking outward.
“Shit,” he said.
The man-woman thing had already played some part in their relationship. If nothing else, she peed away from them, whereas Cam and Newcombe were as casual about it as boys could be. But there were other nuances—her hand in his, climbing over the bent wire of a fence, or her nod of appreciation when he opened a can of pears and gave it to her first. Had he ever done the same for Newcombe? He supposed so. More than once he’d grabbed the other man’s arm to help him past a car wreck. Last night he’d even offered Newcombe first chance at a jar of chocolate syrup because Ruth was still eating from a tin of ham, but with Newcombe these gestures were straightforward and thoughtless.
With Ruth, he read more into everything. He felt hope, and it was good and i
t upset him at the same time. Cam had no expectations that she regarded him the same way, not with his rough, blistered face. Not with his ragged hands.
He could have been angry, but he had seen what that kind of bitterness did to so many others. Sawyer. Erin. Manny. Jim. All of them dead. Cam had come far enough from those memories to see those people in a different light, and to see himself differently. Either you discovered how to live with yourself or you self-destructed, in hundreds of little ways or all at once, and Cam was thankful to be a part of something so much larger than himself. To be someone new.
But you can’t tell her, he thought. Things are too complicated as it is, and there’s no way she could—
Explosions pounded the earth. The vibrations hit in three or four rolling impacts and Cam jolted onto his knees and peered up out of the drain, looking for fire or smoke.
Newcombe wrestled past him. “Let me see.”
“It was that way.”
A steadier noise washed over them, a collection of howling engines that cut out of the southwest. The fighters. Cam realized that what he’d thought were missile strikes had been sonic booms as the jets accelerated close above the city, ahead of their own sound, but then he saw two specks briefly, darting east at an angle that did not correspond with the direction of the turbulence overhead.
There were other planes in the sky, maneuvering for position. They were already miles away and Cam held still as he tried to picture the chase in his head, seeking any advantage. Should they use this chance to run? Where?
“Fuck, I’m an idiot,” Newcombe said as he turned to grab his pack. His radio.
“What’s happening?” Ruth asked, blocked in behind them.
“The first planes are from the rebels, maybe Canada,” Newcombe said. “That’s good. They’ll help us. I just never thought they’d risk it.”
Cam frowned as he glanced at the other man, sharing his disgust. They had all made the wrong assumption, always afraid of the sky, but it had only made sense to act as if they were alone. Except for Leadville’s new forward base, there were no organized forces here along the coast, either rebel or loyalist. The mountains in California and Oregon offered little more than a few scattered islands above the barrier, with few survivors. Their nearest allies were in Arizona and northern Colorado and Idaho, where the refugee populations had declared their independence from Leadville. But with the lion’s share of the United States Air Force, Leadville had claimed military superiority even before developing weaponized nanotech. Cam and Newcombe had never expected anyone to interfere.