by Jeff Carlson
“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 ‚nally 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 ‚ne 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 ‚nding cover again. In his systematic way, Newcombe had even taken ‚ve 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 ‚ve 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 ‚re.
“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 ‚st. “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 identi‚ed the aircraft as F-22 Raptors and wrote brie†y 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 con‚dence 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 ‚lthy, 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 ‚ve 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 †ed from his movement, scurrying across the concrete. He crushed it. He watched the ruins and the gossamer webs, ‚ghting 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 †ower, 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 t
o be any bees left, or butter†ies 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 †oods, unless they developed new nano tools — machines to ‚ght 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 ‚rst. 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 ‚rst 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 it 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 ‚re 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 ‚ghters. 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 brie†y, 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 ‚rst 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.
Their radio was a small, broken thing — a headset and a control box. It was designed to be worn with a containment suit, the earpiece and microphone inside, the controls on the suit’s waist. They had cut it free of Newcombe’s gear on the ‚rst day, splicing the wires back together again. They’d also packed up Ruth and Cam’s radios as extras.
Newcombe held up the headset and then there was a woman whispering inside their little concrete box. The same woman as always. Every day, every night, Newcombe worked to ‚nd a signal other than the loop broadcast cajoling them to surrender, but the suit radio was more of a walkie-talkie than a real ‚eld unit. It had limited range and only operated on ten military bands, and Leadville was jamming all frequencies except this one.
Her words were calm and practiced. “. come for you anywhere, save you, just answer me…”
In the city and on the highway, they had also found police, ‚re‚ghter, and army radios for the taking. Ri†es, too, although Cam couldn’t use a larger weapon with the knife wound on his hand.
During the ‚rst days of the plague, local and federal forces had tried everything to meet the threat, often with opposing intents. There were roadblocks. There were eastbound convoys and escorts. Once they’d come across an old battle‚eld where an armored Guard company had turned back CHP and sheriff units, uselessly. It was all just part of the mess.
Good batteries were a problem, though. Many of the civilian and military radios had been left on as their operators †ed or died, maybe hoping, impossibly, that help could still come. Even when Newcombe got something working, the civilian frequencies were deserted, and the Sierras made it easier for Leadville’s forward base to override the military bands. Sitting on top of the immense wall of the mountains, Leadville could block out every other voice.
The woman taunted them. “If you’re hurt, if you’re tired, we have medical personnel standing by and we. ”
Newcombe switched through his channels rapidly. Static. Static. “Those jets have been trying to reach us this whole fucking time,” he said. “That’s why they’re down so low, to get under the jamming. To stay off Leadville’s radar net.”
“But what can they do?” Ruth asked. “Would they land?”
“No. Not ‚ghters. Not here. But they can give us information and they can keep Leadville off our backs. We had contingencies. We—”
A lot of things happened fast. Two of the planes roared back again almost directly overhead, an invisible pair of shock lines that hammered through the ruins. It was as if a giant hand dragged two ‚ngers across the houses and the water, lifting waves and debris — and inside this hurricane, a †urry of white-hot sparks tumbled down toward the sea, so bright that a con†ict of shadows rippled over the drowned city, stark and black even in full daylight. It was chaff, a defensive tool intended to blind and distract heat-seeking missiles. But if there were missiles, Cam didn’t notice. A smaller line of destruction chased after the jets, stitching its way through mud banks, buildings, and cars. Gun‚re. Cam saw the large-caliber explosive rounds kick apart an entire home, tearing through wood and brick like it was paper, before he winced and ducked away and three more jets screamed past.
At the same time Newcombe grunted, ha, triumphant. Beneath the noise, the radio was chanting in a man’s voice loud with popping static:
“. air is against the wall, the chair is against. ”
It faded out. The jets were gone. Cam didn’t understand the weird phrase, but Newcombe was nodding. Newcombe clicked twice at his SEND button, a quick and untraceable signal of squelch, acknowledging the message even as he looked back and forth at Cam and Ruth. “Good news,” he said.
3
Ruth woke up hurting. Her ‚ngers. Her wrist. The feeling was a hard, grinding itch and Ruth thrashed out of her sleeping bag, frantic to move away from the pain. It was a re†ex as basic as lifting your hand off of a ‚re, but these embers were inside her. The machine plague. She knew that but she moved anyway, screaming in the dark.
“Get up! Get up!”
The stars were intense, close and sharp, like a billion fragments of light. Even through the bronze len
s of her goggles, Ruth could see the neat, open canyon of the residential street around her — but as she tried to stand, she cracked her knee on something. Then the ground rocked and clanged beneath her. She nearly fell. She grabbed with both arms and struck Newcombe as he sat up.
The two of them were in the truck bed of a big Dodge pickup, she remembered. They’d found a boat at last, well before sunset, but spent forty minutes looking for a vehicle capable of towing it. Negotiating the truck through the ruins cost them another hour. By then they were losing daylight and Cam suggested using the truck itself for camp, two of them sleeping as the third stood guard. The tires were as good as stilts and they’d soaked the road beneath with gasoline in case ants or spiders came hunting.
“What—” Newcombe said, but he stopped and stared at his gloved hands. “Christ.”
He felt it, too.
“We’re in a hot spot!” Ruth cried, wrenching her bad arm as she staggered up again. “Cam? Cam, where are you!? We have to get out of here!”
A white beam slashed across the darkness from inside the long, thin ‚shing boat, parked on its trailer. Then the †ashlight jogged higher, re†ecting on the beige paint as Cam stepped onto the bow. “Wait,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“We can’t—”
“We’ll go. Just wait. Get your stuff. Newcombe? We’d better splash ourselves with more gasoline. Who knows what the hell else is awake right now.”
His methodical voice should have helped Ruth control herself. He was right. There were too many other dangers to run blindly into the night, but the pain was bad and growing worse and every breath carried more nanotech into their lungs.
Their ski gear was only designed to repel snow and cold. Jackets, goggles, and fabric masks could never be proof against the plague. In fact, the masks were nearly useless. They wore their makeshift armor only to reduce their exposure, but it was an impossible battle. Thousands of the microscopic particles covered each short yard of ground, thicker here, thinner there, like unseen membranes and drifts. With every step they stirred up great puffs of it, yet even holding still would be no help. They were deep within an invisible ocean. Airborne nanos blanketed the entire planet, forming vast wells and currents as the weather dictated, and this fog would be its worst down here at sea level. The wind might sweep it up and away, but rain and runoff and gravity were a constant drag on the subatomic machines. Newcombe hadn’t wanted to drink the water because he was afraid of bacteria, but even if he’d had puri‚er tablets, Ruth would have stopped him because this shoreline must be dense with the machine plague.