by Jeff Carlson
I can make everything worse, he thought, glancing out at the night again and the muted white points of the stars. Much closer, he saw the red beacons of a comm/radar plane returning from patrol.
Ulinov believed the Russian leadership was using the link through the Italians to create confusion and fear. He believed it was a backhanded test of strength. They were pushing in order to be pushed back. They wanted to be slapped down. They wanted the Americans to feel con‚dent, and that meant.
It meant a double cross.
The idea was so dangerous that he tried to move it out of his head completely, but the signs were all there. He’d never expected to go home again anyway. Not home, that was impossible, but he’d always understood he had little chance of rejoining his people no matter where they ended up. His duty was here. That was acceptable as long as he succeeded in doing his part.
Were they selling their loyalty to the Chinese after all? Something different?
Nikola Ulinov turned his eyes to the pockets of light in this cold, small, overcrowded city, his pulse beating with guilt and conviction at the same time. First he tried to access new messages, but either there were none or the Americans had intercepted them. Then he began his text with his authentic sign-on, Charlie, perhaps someone’s idea of a joke. It had been given to him months ago by the Russian foreign intelligence agency, SVR. Broken down into English, his message would be ominous, and his leadership would realize he was playing along. No bargain yet on ntech but U.S. pressed hard by rebels. Suggest you download all ISS ‚les. Make offer to—
He interrupted himself, breaking the connection as if the cellular system dropped him or his phone had failed. Let the Americans make a mountain out of that. Ulinov could sell them enough bullshit in the meantime to keep them occupied.
Something awful was going to happen.
10
Helicopters thudded in the darkness and Ruth crawled into the †at tire of an Army truck before she was awake, scraping her cheek and forehead against the lug nuts.
“Here,” Cam said. “Over here.”
She moved to his voice, shuf†ing in the dirt. They’d left the highway to make camp, settling down against an old troop carrier that had gone no more than four hundred yards before bogging down. The vehicle’s nose canted into the earth, which had been mud at the time. Now the con†icting angles of the hillside and the truck added to Ruth’s disorientation. She bumped into Cam. He held Newcombe’s ri†e in both hands but leaned toward her for an instant, like the beginnings of a hug. She pushed against him, needing more physical contact.
The helicopters were far away and seemed to going farther. Ruth glanced wildly into the night, not believing it. Then a man’s silhouette blocked out the stars and she †inched. The scattered light was mirrored in the lens of Newcombe’s goggles. “They’re headed south,” he said.
The noise echoed and slapped against the foothills, fading. But there was a new sound, the hammer of guns. It was barely audible, a tat tat tat tat against the larger drumbeat. Tat tat tat. Assault ri†es.
“Oh shit,” Ruth said with sudden clarity. She and Cam jumped to their feet beside Newcombe, staring into the dark. There was nothing to see. The ‚ghting was too distant. They probably wouldn’t have heard the clash at all in a living world. The sound carried for unknown miles.
“They got Young and Brayton,” Newcombe said.
Cam shook his head. “You can’t be sure.”
“There’s no one else down here.”
It changed everything. In her mind, Ruth had already quit, and she didn’t know how anyone could blame her. She’d done her best. She’d decided to tell Newcombe in the morning. Let’s call your people. I can’t hike any more. Now the safety net was gone. She wasn’t able to hold on to the hope that Captain Young and Todd Brayton would spread the vaccine themselves. Leadville had the nanotech, and Ruth knew exactly what the president’s council intended to do with it.
One world. One people.
What would humanity look like if they succeeded? Most of the survivors in the United States were white. The immigrant and minority populations across North America had lived on the coasts and in the inner cities. Los Angeles. New York. Toronto. Detroit. It was the heartlands that had survived — and to a certain mind-set, this purity would increase the appeal of claiming the entire Earth. Leadville would share the vaccine only if they needed to expand their labor force, permitting foreign populations to come down from the mountains as farmers and slaves.
What if one of her friends had gotten away? Captain Young might have covered Todd as he ran from the choppers…No. Ruth was through fooling herself. The responsibility was hers. It had always been hers. She glanced at the stars again, ‚ghting tears. Then she clenched her ‚st and held on to the grinding ache inside her cast.
It’ll be light soon, she thought.
She walked to her sleeping bag and began to pack up.
* * * *
It took them seven days to cover eighty-‚ve miles, the last twenty-‚ve away from any roads. Newcombe was afraid that Leadville had dropped motion detectors or even a few soldiers on every peak in the area, equipping small squads with radios and rations and then ordering them to wait. Cam pointed out how many islands there were throughout the nearest ‚fty square miles, and Leadville had no way of knowing they’d gone north out of Sacramento, not south. There would be countless acres of safe ground on the plateaus of Yosemite. Much closer to their real position, around Lake Tahoe, were dozens of high mountains and ridgelines. Even if Leadville only targeted the major highways that branched up toward elevation, they would need to commit hundreds of troops. Still, the chance existed, so Ruth, Cam, and Newcombe had bypassed the largest islands within reach and hiked toward a smaller line of bumps instead.
Eight more times they’d felt the burn of nano infections. There was now a dark, thready patch of subcutaneous hemorrhaging on the back of Ruth’s left hand — her broken arm, the nanotech always going after any preexisting weakness. The bruise was healing but she suspected it would scar. Another mark on her. Worse, her feet were rubbed raw in her boots because she didn’t want to complain. Her pack had chafed her left shoulder badly because it rode funny, the strap catching on the sling for her cast.
There were helicopters again. There were jets. They stumbled into another stretch of land that was thick with lizards and snakes, and then a dead forest littered with dead beetles, and then the hike abruptly got easier.
The Sierra range had been in its third day of blizzard conditions when the plague spread. The snow stopped a lot of vehicles. They began to see the traf‚c breaking apart around sixty-‚ve hundred feet, the cars falling off the road or lined up in strange ways. Cam attributed the new patterns to bad visibility and traction. At one point Newcombe got a Ford Expedition started and they made fourteen miles in a hurry. Another time they went three miles in a van, and nearly twenty in a pickup truck. Unfortunately there were still plenty of stalls and crashes, especially wherever the road curved. In the snow, the turns had become traps. They had to leave all three of their vehicles. Thousands of four-wheel drives and military trucks and tanks had fought up through the blizzard, as had little snowmobiles and more unexpected things like farm tractors and ‚re engines, whatever was heavy enough to bull through the snow. But even these vehicles had gathered in clumps and fence-like formations. Wherever one stopped, others hit or steered wide and got stuck. The drivers had been hysterical and bleeding and blind.
Newcombe rummaged through most of the military trucks, not only looking for food and batteries but for clothing. They had all been in civilian gear they’d scavenged in Sacramento, but Newcombe took a stained Army jacket for himself. He had always found comfort in his training and experience. This was different. Ruth thought he wanted to have conducted himself well if they were captured or killed. He wanted to belong to his squad in the end, and she admired him for it.
She wasn’t sleeping well. She dreamed too much and constantly woke despite her ex
haustion, as if her mind was in overdrive trying to process it all.
That the air kept getting thinner didn’t help. Any decrease in oxygen made the body anxious. The heart beat harder, and the brain reacted. Cam gave her melatonin and he gave her Tylenol PM, ‚rst a minor overdose, then as many as ‚ve pills at once. He even tried antihistamines because a side effect was drowsiness, and still Ruth muttered and twitched.
The nightmare was real.
* * * *
“Don’t touch anything,” Newcombe said, stepping backward into the rushing wind. The sky was clear and perfect but the few, thin clouds were moving very fast. The cold ripped across the desolate earth, whistling through the gaps in the small rock structure in front of them.
Cam stared into the low hut with one hand on his gun belt, although Ruth didn’t think he was aware of his defensive pose. “It looks like some kind of…like murder-suicide,” he said.
No, she thought. No, I don’t think so.
This mountaintop was a dead place. Walking across the barrier had been a dizzying experience. There were thousands of crosses scraped into the rock. The shape was everywhere. Hundreds of the marked stones had also been arranged into larger crosses themselves, laid across the ground. Some stretched as long as twenty feet. Others, made of pebbles, covered only a few inches. It was the work of countless days.
“Let’s get out of here,” Newcombe said.
“We need to bury them.” Ruth couldn’t bear to look at shriveled corpses anymore. She let her eyes follow the wind instead. Farther east and south, toward Tahoe, the Sierras created a high, ragged skyline as far as she could see. They’d reached ten thousand feet, but only barely. This peak stood alone above the barrier, separated by miles of open space from the nearest other peaks.
In the late afternoon, the distance looked much greater, crowded with shadows. Her grief was equally vast. Ruth’s face twisted suddenly and she slumped down, catching herself on one knee and her good hand. The marked pebbles lay all around.
Cam knelt beside her. “Ruth? Ruth, whatever happened here was a long time ago,” he said, but that didn’t change her exhaustion or her lonely despair.
How many islands were like this one?
All this way for nothing, she thought. Then, like a different voice, They suffered for nothing.
These people had lived through the ‚rst winter or even longer, stacking rocks for shelter, breaking the pine trees and brush beneath this tiny safe zone for ‚rewood. Now they were gone. There were six big graves, each too big for a single person. Two more bodies sprawled inside their pathetic little shack with no one left to put them in the ground.
A knife and a special rock lay in between the two women, a nearly round boulder etched all over with crosses. It had been used to crush the smaller woman’s head and then the last survivor seemed to have sawed open her own throat.
Cam thought there had been some sort of religious holocaust. Ruth believed the crosses were something else. They had begged the sky for salvation. They’d tried to direct their souls away from this misery. Disease had taken them. The men might have missed it, because birds had been at the corpses, but the tight rotted ‚lm of their skin was distended and black behind their ears. They had endured the machine plague only to be destroyed by another contagion.
“We need to bury these people,” Ruth said.
Cam nodded. “Okay. Okay. But there’s no shovel.”
“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 ‚eld 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 ‚nd 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 †u. 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 speci‚c 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 †eas, pests that were extinct everywhere else for lack of hosts. “If we ‚nd 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 ‚nd 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, ‚ghting 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 ‚fty yards downhill, waving his arms.
At ‚rst Ruth thought he was warning them away. More bodies? Then she realized he was pointing east and she brie†y glanced down at the rock inside her ‚st, 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 cook‚res were repeated both days, late in the morning and again at sunset. There was de‚nitely 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 ‚st.
“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-‚ve 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.