by Jeff Carlson
* * * *
The room looked bigger in the yellow-gray dawn and still had some semblance of neatness above the floor. The posters. The toy robots and books on the shelves. Ruth tried not to let it affect her, but she was very tired. She hurt. She mourned this anonymous boy and everything he represented—and wrapped up in her misery was a cold, stubborn anger.
She was ready to keep moving.
She knew it was worth it.
Even as hard as life had become in the mountains, there was no excuse for the decisions made by the Leadville government. If they won, if they left most of the world’s survivors to die above the barrier, in many ways it would be a crime worse than the plague itself. What this place and every graveyard like it deserved was new life. A cleansing. The ruins should be bulldozed where they couldn’t be repaired, repopulated where the damage hadn’t been so bad, and there were desolate cities across the globe, far more than could be reclaimed for generations. They’d forgotten. The leadership was too insulated, trapped on their island fortress.
Ruth made herself eat with grim focus, even though her stomach still felt like a knot and breakfast was a few cans of cold, gluey potatoes and beef. Cam ate like it hurt him, and Ruth wanted to say something, she wasn’t sure what. Her taste buds stung at the fresh reek of gasoline. The stench made her head ache, but at least she could barely smell the corner of the closet they’d had to use as a toilet.
“Show me your map again,” she said.
Newcombe set down his can and unbuttoned his jacket pocket. He invariably folded his map and tucked it away, in case they had to run—but his neatness was also about control, Ruth thought, watching his long, hawk-nosed face. Sandy blond eyebrows and beard stubble. Newcombe looked so young, even beneath the ant bites and dirt and the flaking raw pink spots that were being worn into his skin by his goggles and mask.
She didn’t like his silence. Newcombe was impatient, jerking at the map when a corner of it hung up in his pocket. Yes, they were all sore and irritable, and they’d already talked through their options after the planes had gone, but they couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice.
Their plan was to sprint back to the truck and drive out of the hot spot as fast as possible. The boat trailer was already attached and Newcombe had ripped open the truck’s ignition, so that starting it was a matter of pressing two wires together. Even after fourteen months of disuse, the battery had kept enough power to crank the engine once. Then they’d run it for more than an hour to generate a charge. We built good, Newcombe had said with surprising softness, leaning his hand on the truck’s tall, broad hood. He might have only been talking to himself, but Ruth believed he’d felt the same melancholy pride that haunted her now, sitting in the wreckage of this child’s room. She was glad. Even the relentless Special Forces soldier wasn’t untouchable.
Newcombe was confident the truck would start again, and the boat’s enormous motor had also fired right up. The question was where were they going.
The chair is against the wall. That strange sentence had changed everything, shifting the balance between them. It was almost as if there were suddenly other people among the three of them, just when she’d finally begun to adapt to being so utterly on their own. Ruth had become accustomed to outnumbering Newcombe. Cam always backed her, but now Newcombe had new power, and Ruth thought Cam was wavering.
The radio code was a rendezvous point. Despite the chaos of the plague year, it was still the twenty-first century. The Canadians had their own eyes in the sky. The rebels controlled three American satellites themselves. The surge of radio traffic in Leadville could not be hidden, especially in this now-empty world. Nor could the sudden flux of aircraft. Even if the Canadians hadn’t been involved in the conspiracy, promising aid and shelter, they would have known something big was going on.
Newcombe’s squad had gone into Sacramento with no less than eight contingency plans, five of which led to open stretches of road where a plane could touch down, and Ruth did not doubt that those men could have reached one of their rendezvous points long before now if they’d been moving on their own, even wearing containment suits, even hauling extra air tanks.
The Canadians planned to intercept them, lancing down out of British Columbia. The two North American nations had coexisted as friends and allies for nearly three hundred years, but now Canada would raid across the border in force, committing four full strike wings as a curtain against any Leadville fighters. Newcombe wanted to head for Highway 65 just north of Roseville, and Ruth was tempted. She yearned for it. Safety. Warm food. Oh God, and a shower. But it would mean pushing farther north once they were across the sea, staying in the lowlands rather than hiking east into the mountains—and there was a deeper fear in her.
“Look.” Newcombe laid out the map with his naked hands, his knuckles bruised and scabbing. Then he edged his finger slightly from Citrus Heights to Roseville. “Look how close. We could get there in a day or two.”
“I just don’t know,” Ruth said, touching the rough patches on her face where her own goggles had pressed in. She was thinking of the paratrooper ambush that had destroyed Newcombe’s squad. “They’d come in one of those big cargo planes, right?” she asked.
“Not necessarily. I’d send something small and fast.”
The thought of cramming herself into a plane made Ruth claustrophobic again and she glanced uneasily at the walls of the room. Not all of the ISS crew had survived the crash of the space shuttle Endeavour. “All it takes is one missile to bring us down,” she said, “and Leadville will do anything to keep anybody else from getting the vaccine. They’ve already shown that.”
“There are ways to defend against air-to-air missiles, especially if our escort doesn’t let anyone close,” Newcombe said. “And if we don’t do this, we’ll have to keep playing hide-andseek with the helicopters. We’ve been lucky so far.”
“But we’re so close to the mountains here!” Ruth met his blue eyes, pleading with him. “The whole idea is to spread the vaccine to as many people as possible, so no one can ever control or keep it.” She worried that the Canadian government would prove just as selfish. Overall, their losses had been even worse than those in the United States, and they might view the nanotech as the same opportunity for conquest and rebirth.
“We’re not that close,” Newcombe said. “Look. Look where we are. It’s still a hundred miles to the Sierras and it’s going to keep getting more and more uphill. You have to realize we’re still weeks away from elevation. You don’t even know if anyone’s alive up there. We could wander around for another month just trying to find a mountain where someone’s survived this long.”
And they might be dangerous if they did, Ruth thought, unable to stop herself from glancing at Cam. It was a real concern. Lord knew some of those survivors would be too desperate to care why or how they’d come, but she didn’t say it. She wasn’t going to give Newcombe anything else to use against her. Ruth genuinely believed that most people would help them, and once they’d reached four or five groups they would be unstoppable, dispersing in every direction, filling the dead zones of the plague like a new human tide.
“This is our best chance to get somewhere,” Newcombe said.
I’m stronger than you are, Ruth realized, but she needed to be careful. She couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him. “I just don’t like it,” she said.
Cam finally interjected, and Ruth was grateful. “I know what I’d do,” he said. “This isn’t usable ground for them, not if we get away. If I was Leadville, if I thought the Canadians were going to take off with us, I’d just nuke the whole area. Here. Oregon. Wherever they could drop a bomb in front of us. There’s no way a plane can defend against that, right?”
“That’s crazy,” Newcombe said. “This is their own ground— it’s American soil.”
“No. Not anymore.”
“They’ll stick to conventional weapons,” Newcombe insisted. “Look, it’s a gamble either way, so we take
our best bet. We get the rebels and the Canadians behind us.”
Ruth clenched her arm in its cast, wondering how deeply his training had affected his thinking. The need for structure. Newcombe was an incredible asset, a great soldier and obviously comfortable improvising in any situation, but he was still a soldier, with the expectation of fitting into a larger command.
He was going to be a problem.
“Do you want to get left down here?” he asked, gesturing at her broken arm. Had he seen the fist she’d made?
The infections last night scared him, she thought. Me, too. But at least she knew how rare it should be to hit a concentration that bad, especially once they got out of the delta.
“They’re willing to put a lot of lives on the line,” Newcombe said. “Fuel. Planes. Taking you north was always the plan, get you into a lab, make the vaccine better and then spread it everywhere.”
“We can still do that,” Ruth said, slowly. “We can do that after we’ve given the vaccine to a few people out here.”
Cam surprised her. “We could split up,” he said.
She was right that he had been uncertain but wrong about the biggest question on his mind. She’d thought he was halfway to agreeing with Newcombe to jump on a plane. Instead, he had found another way out of the box. He was willing to leave her— and it upset her more than she would have guessed. It made her angry.
“Why don’t we split up,” Cam said. “I can try for the mountains while you guys go to the rendezvous.”
It felt like betrayal.
4
They were on the water before the sun lifted clear of the mountains. They were well-practiced by now and stripped the house in five minutes, finding a case of bottled water in the kitchen and a good haul of disinfectant, gauze, tape, and perfume in the bathrooms. Then they ran to the truck. Newcombe started it easily as Cam and Ruth climbed into the boat behind him. Everything looked good. But they were more silent than usual, Cam noticed, and he knew he’d frightened Ruth. Fine. She had to understand. He wasn’t her dog and he wouldn’t always say yes. Still, he caught himself looking for her eyes as Newcombe drove away from the house.
She ignored him. Armored in her goggles and mask, Ruth held tight to her seat, turned almost sideways because she could only use one arm.
The boat was a twenty-two-foot Champion, lean like an arrow and nearly as thin. With a hull less than three feet deep from top to bottom, it was more of a bass fishing platform than a riding craft. It had only two seats set in its smooth deck. The Champion was designed to speed fishermen from one good hole to the next, and that was perfect. Cam guessed that even the motor shaft wouldn’t stick more than a couple feet below the surface, which would be crucial out there in the ruins.
Newcombe drove to the shore slower than Cam expected. They must have reentered the hot spot as soon as they left the house, but the street barely had any downward slope and the waterline had crawled up and back many times, leaving thirty yards of muck and garbage in lines and dunes.
“Hang on!” Newcombe shouted. They crunched through styrofoam and plastic, a lamp shade, empty soda cans, and stinking damp clothing and paper. Endless skins of paper. Ahead of them, the shallow edge of the sea was thick with bobbing junk, clogged in between the homes on either side. Newcombe intended to drive straight in. The truck was a big monster. Newcombe thought it would keep churning until the water was deep enough to float the Champion off its trailer. He didn’t want to risk getting caught on something if they backed in like you were supposed to do.
Then the truck hit the water, clattering through the debris. They shuddered over something big. The trailer rocked up on one side and the boat slid the other way, almost bumping loose. They’d already removed the rope ties that secured the Champion to the trailer, not wanting to miss any surge that would carry it free. Now that seemed tremendously stupid.
But it worked. Newcombe dragged on the steering wheel and the truck hooked even further to the side, its engine spluttering. The Champion slid away and drifted a few yards. All around the boat, the surface clunked with charred, waterlogged bits of lumber.
Newcombe killed the engine. He got out of the truck and slogged over cautiously, dirty and wet while they were dry. Cam helped him into the rocking boat and said, “Nice work, man. You do nice work.”
“Got a little sketchy there for a minute,” Newcombe said. That was all. Still, Cam sensed a chance to rebuild everything between them, rather than allowing Ruth’s mistrust to continue to push them apart. He could make a new beginning. But he wasn’t here for Newcombe. He turned from the other man and glanced at Ruth and then past her at the cluttered sea, wanting more than anything to talk to her alone.
He didn’t want to fight. Every minute in this place was enough of a struggle without losing her.
* * * *
The motor echoed strangely. The sound yammered back at them from every housefront but raced away into every gap, bouncing in and out of broken windows and open doors as they eased through residential streets.
Newcombe drove with the 260-horsepower Mercury throttled down. The Champion wouldn’t go any slower than five miles per hour and coasted effortlessly. Too often they bumped and bounced into tight spots, the propeller grinding once on a submerged car and then blasting through a door window in a slosh of bubbles and glass. Several times they scratched against drifts of dead brush and lumber and garbage. The ruins formed an incredible maze. Cam used it as best he could, always looking east for a way out. Sometimes that was easy. The flood had come from that direction and knocked down fences and cleared yards, often leaving bars of debris and mud on the lee side of the buildings—the west side. Streets that ran east tended to have been swept clear.
They had to know if they could boat up the river, even if it meant another argument. Newcombe must have realized what Cam was doing, but none of them had any interest in going west and the two men worked well together. Once they struggled to lift aside a snaking mess of utility lines. Once they took turns leaning out of the boat to kick away a long sheet of aluminum. There were still odd little things floating in the most stagnant corridors, a toy farmhouse, shoes, a perfectly sealed Tupperware container blotched on the inside with mold.
The sun flickered everywhere, clean acres of light on the dirty sea. It shimmered in patches of chemicals. It sparked on glass and metal and lit up every scratch in the lens of Cam’s goggles, turning his head, making shapes that weren’t there.
Again and again they were caught in delicate threads. Hundreds of strands flagged out from thousands of spiders. Newcombe accelerated suddenly after they idled through the collapsed shell of a home and found themselves within arm’s reach of a wall full of silk and white nests, all of it packed with tiny brown bodies. The water not only protected the spiders from the ants. It also kept this region cool enough that they were probably never affected by the plague, even in summer, and Cam wondered again at the niche evolution they kept seeing. It seemed to him that the remnants of the ecosystem were pulling further apart rather than working toward any new cohesion, but he was too tired to think how it might end.
Moving east was a waste of time. After forty minutes Cam and Newcombe were finally able to study that shore through binoculars. What they could see of it was an impassable mud slope, raked through with dozens of narrow trickles of water. It made the decision for them. North.
An hour later Newcombe chose a spot to run the Champion aground. They sped into the cramped swamp beneath a massive highway interchange where the boat would be hidden. Newcombe unlatched the motor’s cover and Cam helped him dump more than thirty canteens of water onto the engine, dousing its heat. There was no sense leaving a bright heat signature at the shoreline, pointing the way they’d gone. Cam figured they’d covered a little less than twice the distance they would have hiked on foot, but that was partly the point—to give Ruth every opportunity to rest. She had even lain down for a while against the coil of rope at the nose of the deck, totally withdrawn
.
They needed to talk about what she wanted him to do.
* * * *
They could have had the chance. As soon as the three of them cleared a fence and made their way onto the Interstate again, Newcombe called a halt and knelt, checking his watch. He quickly reorganized his pack. On the outside were mesh pockets where he kept one of their little radios, his binoculars, and a squeeze bottle of gasoline. Now he tucked away the radio and binoculars and put jars of maple syrup into those pockets instead, preparing to range off by himself and set more food traps.
Cam stopped him. “Wait.”
“I’ll catch up.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Cam said, aware of Ruth’s gaze switching back and forth between them. Her posture had changed as soon as it became obvious what Newcombe was doing. She’d stood a little straighter, but now that bent, worried tension returned to her shoulders again.
Cam felt badly. He wanted to reassure her, but this was more important. “We can’t set any decoys on this side of the water,” he said. “Not right away. Think about it. When you put them all over downtown, the swarms couldn’t have formed much of a pattern. But if Leadville notices the worst swarms are moving north, they’ll realize we’re causing it.”
Newcombe stared at him. “Okay.”
“C’mon,” Cam said to Ruth, gently touching her good arm. She looked at his hand and then raised her face to his, her busy eyes trying to read him. He nodded once. It was the best signal that he could give her, hidden in his goggles and mask.
They walked. They walked and every minute it got harder. Stress and fatigue poisons left them sluggish and the sameness of the hike was wearing in its own way, the endless cars, the endless dead. Newcombe was the first to see the few spots of clouds in the west. Cam hoped it would thicken up. A good overcast would be some protection against satellites and planes. Any drop in temperature would slow the bugs, too. More important, their jackets and hoods were individual sweat shells. They were always dehydrated.