by Jeff Carlson
“It’ll be dark in an hour,” Newcombe said.
“We can’t just leave them here!”
“I know what to do.” Cam walked to the shack. He set one hand on the rock wall, testing it. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved. The corner gave. Most of the branches holding the roof fell in. He hit the wall again and the rest of it collapsed. The rubble formed a poor cairn, but it would have to be enough.
“Please,” Ruth whispered. “Please be safe. Find somewhere safe.” Her words weren’t for these strangers, of course, and ultimately she hadn’t insisted on putting them to rest for their sake, either. It was a way to try to heal a few of her own terrible wounds.
* * * *
They picked their way down into the growing shadows on the east side of the mountain, moving north toward a small field of snow. They wanted to stay above the barrier, but they couldn’t risk catching whatever had killed these people.
“We should scrub our boots and gloves,” Newcombe said.
“Let’s hit that snow.” Cam gestured. “We can use some for water, too.”
Ruth squeezed one of the etched pebbles in her hand. She had taken it in secret. She didn’t know why, except that the impulse had been too strong to repress. “I don’t understand how this happened,” she said. “Everyone there...”
Cam stayed with her as Newcombe ranged ahead. “It won’t be like that on every island,” he said. “We’ll find somebody.”
“But that’s what I mean. If there was anything good about the machine plague, it’s that most diseases must have been wiped out at the same time. The flu. Strep. The population’s too scattered.”
“Don’t people carry a lot of that stuff inside them even when they’re not really sick?”
He had EMT training, she knew. She nodded. “Yes.”
“So some islands would just be unlucky. The people get weak, they’re always cold, a virus takes over.” Cam hesitated, then said, “It’s not your fault. You know that.”
“You mean some diseases might have adapted.” Ruth seized on that part of what he’d said because she didn’t know how to answer to the rest. “Yes. We’re going to have to be more careful. There might be other islands that... Some islands might be Typhoid Marys, where everyone’s built specific immunities that we don’t have.”
“How do we test for that?”
“I don’t know.” Some islands would also be thick with rats and fleas, pests that were extinct everywhere else for lack of hosts. “If we find anyone who’s obviously sick, we might have to back off. Leave them alone.” Ruth pushed her thumb against the patterns etched into the rock, her mind reeling with quiet horror.
There was another threat they were certain to find among the pockets of survivors. Insanity and delusion could prove to be an even greater problem than disease. Aboard the ISS, Gustavo had reported religious fervor in Mexico, Afghanistan, the Alps, and Micronesia. Holy men had risen everywhere in the apocalypse.
Ruth had never had much use for God. People cited the mysteries and wisdom of faith, pointing to the great understanding of their teachings, but what they’d really done was to close their minds against the true complexity of the planet, to say nothing of the incomprehensibly vast universe. The idea was laughable. What kind of half-wit God would bother to create billions of other galaxies if Earth was the focus of His energies?
It was a very human thing to believe. People were lazy. They were egocentric. Ruth understood wanting a small, controlled world. No one liked uncertainty. It tested the boundaries of human curiosity and intelligence. The monkey was still very strong in modern man. The monkey had limited patience, so people resisted time and change. They developed rationales to show that they were the center of everything, fighting to teach “intelligent design” in schools instead of biology and science. Nonsense. Tall parents tended to have tall kids. Short parents tended to have short kids. Everyone wasn’t identical. It was that easy to see—evolution in a single generation. Otherwise people would have been perfect clones of each other throughout history. To think that life was immutable was a fantasy. Bacteria grew drug-resistant. Dogs could be cultivated into ridiculously specialized breeds like her step-father’s terrier. Religions themselves had evolved with time, some growing more open, some more closed.
There were real answers if you sought the truth. The world was knowable. That was what she’d learned, but it was hard. She would have liked to feel that a larger hand was guiding her, but why her and not the people who died on this mountaintop? Because they were evil?
Ruth clenched down on the pebble again as a slow, stubborn fury worked its way through her. She wouldn’t stop. That was what the rock meant to her. She couldn’t stop even though her feet were broken and sore and her arm was throbbing in its cast.
“Hey!” Newcombe shouted. He stood on an open granite slope about fifty yards downhill, waving his arms.
At first Ruth thought he was warning them away. More bodies? Then she realized he was pointing east and she briefly glanced down at the rock inside her fist, struck by doubt and new hope.
“Look,” she said, touching Cam in celebration.
Far across the valley, barely visible in the yellow dusk, a thread of smoke rose from another mountaintop.
* * * *
It took them two days to hike down and up. Once they saw a large, slow C-130 cargo plane in the south, dragging long cables through the air that Newcombe said were a sensor array. Once there were more snakes.
The cookfires were repeated both days, late in the morning and again at sunset. There was definitely someone up there, but who? Would soldiers give themselves away?
* * * *
Ruth jostled Cam from a dead sleep and he twisted up into the pale moonlight with his hand balled in a fist.
“Shh, it’s okay,” she said.
The moon was a gleaming white crescent in the valley, low enough to the horizon that it appeared nearly level with them at ninety-five hundred feet. Its light cast bars of shadows from the tree trunks—and the shadows moved, creaking. There was a chill breeze in the treetops and the forest was alive. The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang. Ree ree ree ree. The mindless noise lifted and fell on the wind, invading every lull in the sound of the trees.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He relaxed. His mask rustled as he opened his mouth, but he kept quiet. He only nodded and Ruth felt a small, quixotic smile. A lot of things were wrong, obviously. The whole fucking world was wrong. Maybe he’d been about to make the same joke, but there had been new tension between them.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth continued. For what? She was still kneeling very close to him and she tipped her head back, trying to redirect his attention away from herself. “It’s supposed to be Newcombe’s shift, but I thought...I wanted to talk again. Without him.”
“Yeah.”
She had volunteered to stand guard through the first six hours of the night because tomorrow she would stay behind as the men hiked the rest of the way up without her. She would be safe down here. They knew there was no one else below the barrier, whereas the islands above might hold any number of threats.
Ruth had spent three hours in darkness before she woke Cam, three hours with the bugs and the wind. Her head was crowded with fear and loss and distance, poised on this invisible border with thousands of miles of dead zone below them and tiny safe areas above that might not be safe after all.
She didn’t know how to say good-bye.
She owed Cam her life. She should have been able to give him the response he wanted, even if she hadn’t felt an honest attraction. She was tempted. She had become too self-conscious of her backpack whenever she reached into it for water or food or a clean face mask, being very careful to let neither man see the glossy purple box of condoms. She needed comfort and warmth, and yet Cam still frightened her. It wasn’t only the capacity for violence that she saw in him, but his own wretched hunger. She was afraid to get too
near because she couldn’t predict how he would react, so she was quiet, sitting beside him in the whispering night.
There was another danger that Ruth had kept to herself. She didn’t want to rush Cam and Newcombe. Her science team had not incorporated the hypobaric fuse into the vaccine, so that it wouldn’t self-destruct like the plague, but the vaccine was also unlike the plague in another way. It was able to replicate only by attacking and breaking down a single target—its rival. Every minute they spent above the barrier was a new danger, because without its ongoing war against the plague, the vaccine had no way to maintain its own numbers. In fact, if they stayed too long they might become trapped like anyone else after sweating it out, exhaling it, losing it by the millions each time they went to the bathroom.
After sixteen days within the invisible sea, their bodies must be thick with it. Too thick. That might explain her headaches and it might explain the discomfort in her gut. Those things might simply be the result of constant strain and bad food, but it wasn’t impossible that the vaccine would hurt people, too, catching and clotting in the bloodstream, rupturing capillaries, increasing the odds of stroke and arrhythmia. They didn’t know. It had never been tested.
Ruth wanted to believe they’d have days or even weeks before their immunity faded to dangerous levels, but if they had to run...If there were soldiers waiting...They had already been near ten thousand feet for more than eight hours and Ruth couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t be a problem.
The men were just as apprehensive. Newcombe had prepared her for the chance that he and Cam wouldn’t return. He broke down their packs and reassembled one for her to carry herself if necessary, mostly food and a bedroll. He carefully showed her how to use the radio and he made her demonstrate again that she knew how to fire and load her pistol, as if she’d last through a gun battle by herself.
Ruth knew she couldn’t go with them but she hated the price on her skills and education, like she was some goddamned princess in a tower, too precious to be let out—so at last she forced herself to stir in the cold.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Me, too,” Cam said. He was always surprising her.
Ruth shook her head. “Why would, no, you’ve been...”
“Maybe we should have done it Newcombe’s way,” Cam said. “He’s got training I could never ...I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to hike it. Maybe you would have perfected the nanotech by now.”
“Cam, no. It was my idea. Remember? I’m the one who insisted on coming here.” And then after everything else, tomorrow you’re going to walk up there for me, she thought. You’ll walk into the soldiers’ guns, maybe, or find a pack of disease-ridden survivors. There’s no way to know.
Still sitting in his blankets, Cam shifted once, as if containing an argument inside himself.
I couldn’t have done this without you, Ruth thought. Then she touched her fingertips to his forearm, careful not to let it be more. She was careful not to draw down her mask and kiss his cheek, no matter how deeply he deserved the gesture or her gratitude.
“Please be careful,” she said.
11
Cam slipped easily across the rough terrain of granite and sparse forest. He’d dropped his pack this morning but kept his pistol and a canteen—and he knew this environment well, if not this particular mountain. The whitebark pines and junipers were a familiar world, the chokecherry brambles and wild grass.
There was a flutter of grasshoppers to his right. The insects scattered as Newcombe loped over with his rifle in hand and they hunched together behind a tangle of boulders.
They’d heard voices above them distantly. Someone up there liked to yell to his friends, a boy, alternately impatient or happy, his young voice carrying across the open sky. It seemed like a good sign, but maybe the kid was only excited because Leadville troops had recently arrived.
“What do you think?” Newcombe whispered.
Cam only shrugged. In many ways their relationship reminded him of his bond with Albert Sawyer, the man who’d taken them to the lab in Sacramento. His friendship with Sawyer had been loaded with mistrust and need and fierce loyalty all at the same time. He wanted things to be better with Newcombe. He wanted to save his energy, instead of always trying to keep one eye behind him, so he tried again to make peace. “I think you’re right,” he said.
“The layout here might be as good as it gets,” Newcombe said, tipping his chin up at the ridges. “Let’s map this drainage before we work any farther north.”
“Yeah.” Cam reached for his binoculars as Newcombe took a small notepad from his pocket and quickly added to his sketches. The Special Forces soldier had his own shorthand that was detailed and accurate, but Cam paused with his binoculars lifted halfway, reaching out with his ears and other senses instead, measuring the wind and the early afternoon sun. The dust-and-pine smell of the mountain. He could still feel Ruth’s hand on his arm.
He itched to take off his goggles and mask, but the day was warm and clear. Without a barometer, Cam had to assume they were still in danger. The nicest weather typically came with high pressure fronts, which lifted the invisible sea of nanotech. On their maps, the nearest benchmarks read 9,985 and 10,160 feet, but Cam had learned to hold his pessimism close. They were still at least two hundred yards below the tallest peaks.
So far they hadn’t been able to get a look at whoever was up there. They had a bad height disadvantage. This archipelago of high points was like a string of castles. Each of the small islands sat above a sheer, ragged band of lava. If there were soldiers, if they were forced to shoot it out, they would be very exposed.
“Stay here,” Newcombe said.
“We’ll go together.”
“No. We can’t leave her alone, and if I’m coming back in a hurry I’ll need you to cover me.”
Cam nodded. Mark Newcombe was a good man, despite all their disagreements. Newcombe had helped him every day with his hand, cleaning and rebandaging the wound, and Newcombe had continued to haul the largest pack even after Cam took possession of the radios.
“We’ll go together,” Cam said. “At least as far as the ridge. That’s a better place for us to stay in sight of each other, and sooner or later ...You know they’ll spot us. The longer we sneak around, the more likely it’ll happen.”
“Yeah. Stay here.”
“You don’t understand,” Cam said. “Even if there are no soldiers up there, those people will be...different. They could be dangerous.”
Newcombe glanced briefly at the ravine again, then studied Cam for a much longer time. Newcombe’s expression was hidden in his mask and goggles, but his posture was intent. For once Cam was glad to be wrapped in his own gear. He still had one secret and he meant to keep it, especially from Ruth.
“It’s better if it’s both of us,” Cam said, finding his voice again. “Not just for the show of strength. I’ll know what to say to them but you’re proof that it really works, the nanotech. That could make all the difference.”
Newcombe remained silent. Maybe he was thinking of the first mountain and the mad, grinding obsession that must have driven those people to carve thousands of crosses. The sight had shaken Cam to his core, because he never would have believed that anyone had things worse than on his own mountaintop. His group had only lasted eight months before they began to kill and feed on each other.
* * * *
Voices echoed through the ravine and Cam ducked against a car-sized boulder, leaving sunlight for the cool shadows beneath the rock. Newcombe squeezed in beside him with a wild look, then checked his rifle’s safety again. Cam had misjudged the other group’s position. He’d led Newcombe too far up this gully to run back down again and there was no other route from here to the long cliff face above, where they might have scrambled into a crevice and waited and watched. The mountain had fooled him, bouncing the noise away until the other group abruptly moved past a ridgeline and their voices were redirected downhill.
They sounde
d very close.
“Sst,” Newcombe hissed. He bumped Cam with his elbow and signaled efficiently. Four fingers. South side of the rock.
They’ll cross our tracks, Cam thought, although the ground was rough and dry where it wasn’t dotted with snow. He and Newcombe had avoided the fields of dirty ice and the soft new wildflowers and grass. They hadn’t left much trace.
He clenched his teeth, trying to hold down his adrenaline and the stark memories of gunfire and screaming. Then the other group passed into view. They wore uniforms. Cam raised his pistol but Newcombe jammed one hand against his forearm exactly where Ruth had touched him.
“No,” Newcombe whispered.
The uniforms were ragged, once green, now a sun-bleached, filthy color very much like army olive drab. The shoulder patches and other insignia were paramilitary, but they were undisciplined. One had his shirt open and another wore a frayed San Francisco Giants baseball cap. They were teenagers. They were Boy Scouts. All four carried handmade backpacks, stout bare frames of branches lashed with rope, made for stacking and hauling wood.
The boys were skinny and hard and sunburned, and in good spirits. They were laughing.
Cam barely recognized the sound, his body still tight with fear. But it was only his own nerves and the distortions of the rock that had deepened their voices. In fact, he already knew the loudest boy. After listening below them for most of a day, he identified the confident tone immediately as the kid said, “I’m gonna beat your ass today, Brandon.”
“No way.”
“Lose like always.”
“Bite me.”
They were using their chatter like a shield as they crossed into the machine plague, keeping each other brave. That was why they’d grown noisier and noisier as they approached.
Newcombe seemed as stunned as Cam at their fun, stupid banter. Both men hesitated.
It was the loud boy who saw them first, his eyes suddenly huge in his smooth face. “Holy fuck!” The boy’s face drained white and he grabbed two of his friends, yanking them back.