by Jeff Carlson
“Here!” he shouted.
The others came after them, slow and dazed. “That was a nuke!” Alex yelled. “That had to be a nuke, right? They’re nuking each other!” The boy set Mike against a boulder and tugged Mike’s hands away from his wet face, trying to examine the damage. Brandon joined them and then Newcombe and D Mac. Ed directed Kevin and Hiroki into the safe space and everyone knelt down.
Even packed tightly together, they were a miniscule knot of lives and Ruth looked at the sky again with that quiet reaching feeling. Nothing had changed up there. A wisp of clouds ran on the breeze, impossibly calm.
Newcombe squeezed in beside Alex in front of Mike. “Open your eyes,” he said. “You have to open your eyes so we can see, kid.”
“I can’t,” Mike groaned.
Ruth laid her ‚ngers over the etched stone in her pocket. “Was that Utah?” she asked. “Where was that!?” The need in her voice made her ashamed, because that scorching light was a horrible thing to wish on anyone…but if the †ash had been in Colorado…if the holocaust was that far away…
“We should try the radio,” Newcombe said. “Get the radio.”
“Yeah.” Cam shrugged off his pack and set it in Kevin’s lap. They were clumped too close together for anything else. He pulled out a canteen and a bundle of cloth, then removed the thin control box and its aluminum headset.
“There aren’t any burns,” Newcombe said to Mike. “Can you see anything?”
“A little. I see shapes.”
“Good, that’s good.” Newcombe bent around and extended one hand for the radio.
“No,” Cam said slowly.
Ruth glanced back and forth between them, surprised that Cam would distrust him now, until she realized at the same time as Newcombe that Cam was no longer interested in them. She turned. They all did.
“Oh, fuck,” Alex said.
Peering beyond the line of rocks, Ruth saw an immense arc of distortion in the atmosphere, a convulsing, tangled shock wave of force and heat. It spread like a circle on the surface of a pond, although it was so big that they could only see one part of the swelling hole in the sky.
Dully, she realized it must be hundreds of miles away — and hundreds of miles across. It was growing swiftly, rolling west against the normal †ow of weather. It churned the air apart, wiping away the spotty clouds.
“Where was that!?” Ruth asked again, and her voice was high and sharp like a boy’s.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Samantha said.
“What do we do?” Cam said, even as he looked down at the radio in his hand. He offered it to Newcombe, but the soldier was staring at the sky like all of them. He didn’t answer until Cam pressed the gear against his shoulder.
“Yeah. Uh.” Newcombe groped for the headset.
“The radiation,” Cam said.
Then the side of the mountain across the valley from them seemed to jump. Dirt rippled up from the slope in patches and streaks. There were sharp cracks from the rock like gun‚re. In the lower areas, trees swayed. Some toppled. To the southeast, a red cloud of bugs swirled out of the forest in confusion.
The quake shuddered down through ‚fteen miles of mountainside and valley in the blink of an eye. Then it raced over their peak. The ground lurched. One of the boulders above them scraped free and dropped — no more than inches, but it clapped against another granite slab with a bone-grating sound. Chips of rock pelted the group and opened two cuts on Brandon’s cheek. Most of them screamed. Cam dragged Ruth away, stepping on Samantha, falling onto Ed and Hiroki.
The earth was already stable again. It was only their own crowded scrambling that extended the chaos and D Mac and Newcombe shouted at everyone else. “Stop! Stop!”
“We’re okay, it’s done!”
Then the ground shook again. Ruth gasped and stayed down, although this movement was very different. It was lighter, an aftershock.
“It’s okay!” Newcombe shouted, but Hiroki had begun to moan again and Alex yelled and yelled without words.
“Yaaa! Yaaaa!”
Threads of dust and pollen came over the west side of the mountain behind them, lifted into the wind by the quake. It formed banners of brown and yellow, rushing east.
Ruth lay on her side in the open just beyond the pile of granite, watching the unimaginable dent in the sky. Cam moved to help her again. As his hands closed on her waist, she felt a glimmer of something other than mute animal fear. Gratitude. His attempt at escaping the rock hadn’t amounted to much, but it had shown his priorities. He’d left everyone behind for her.
Samantha was weeping now and Alex paced in short vicious steps between the other boys, pressing his ‚sts tight against his head. “Those bastards!” he said. “Those bastards!”
Everyone else was hushed. The instinct to hide was overpowering, and Brandon made little noise as his father dabbed at his cuts with a dirty shirt sleeve, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Nine and a half minutes,” Newcombe remarked, studying his watch again.
His self-control was incredible and Ruth attacked it without thinking, full of envy and disbelief. “What are you doing!” she shouted.
“Approximately nine and a half minutes from detonation until the ‚rst quake,” Newcombe said. He almost seemed to be talking to himself, as if memorizing the information, and Ruth knew he’d write it in his notebook as soon as he got the chance.
“What does that mean?” she asked. “It must have been close—”
“I don’t know,” Newcombe said.
“It must have been Utah or even someplace in Nevada!”
“I don’t know.”
Samantha tucked herself against D Mac, weeping. Hiroki and Kevin quickly scrunched in on either side and kept their heads down. Ruth discovered she was also crying. When had that started? She rubbed her hand against the wetness on her face and looked away from the children. She wanted so badly to lean into Cam and close her eyes, but she hadn’t earned the right. She could only cross her good arm over her cast and hug herself.
He was preoccupied with Newcombe and Alex anyway. The boy had crouched with the two men, forming a tense wall around the radio. They found nothing except crackling white noise, channel after channel. “David Six, this is George,” Newcombe said. “David Six, do you copy?”
Static.
“Does anyone copy my signal? Come back. Anyone. Do you read me? This is California.”
Static.
“I know it works,” Newcombe said. “See? The batteries are good and we must’ve been far enough away that the circuitry wasn’t shorted out by the electromagnetic pulse.”
Alex said, “So what’s wrong?”
“The sky. Look at it. Too much disturbance.” Newcombe pulled his binoculars and dared a few glances to the east, then north and south. “That was very big,” he said softly. “As far as I can tell, it was way out over the horizon, right?”
Ruth pleaded with him. “We couldn’t even see it if it was in Colorado, could we? It’s too far.”
“I don’t know.” Newcombe unfolded their map of North America and set his notebook beside it, scribbling down 9.5. “Leadville is what, seven hundred miles from here? Call it seven hundred and twenty. But who else would be a target? White River?”
“Wait, I know this,” Mike said with his palms still over his eyes. “With the curvature of the planet…Seven hundred miles, we could only see it if it was, uh…”
“White River already got their asses handed to them,” Newcombe said. “Why hit ’em again? Especially with a nuke. Even a neutron bomb. The land’s too precious.”
“We could only see it if it was sixty miles high,” Mike told them. “No way.”
“It must have been in the mountains, though,” Newcombe said. “There’s nobody to bother with underneath the barrier, right? So the strike had to be at elevation.”
“Leadville’s only two miles up.”
“But it looked like a †ashlight, right? Shit, look at it now,” Newcombe
said, forgetting that Mike was half-blind. “It went straight through the sky.”
“The atmosphere’s just not sixty miles tall,” Mike insisted, but he was wrong. Life-sustaining amounts of oxygen could not be found even as low as the tip of Mount Everest, at twenty-nine thousand feet, and yet Ruth knew that the gaseous layers enshrouding the planet actually rose beyond the orbit of the space station, more than two hundred miles above sea level, although the farthest reaches of the exosphere were thin indeed.
Ruth had to believe her own eyes. She couldn’t ignore Newcombe’s training. Leadville was the most powerful city on the continent — the most high-value target — and a doomsday bomb at that altitude might easily have sent its light all the way through the sky. Maybe the †ash had bounced. There was no question that the column of heat behind the light had bubbled up far above the cloud layer, the force of it reverberating back and forth for hundreds of miles.
Would it reach them? The radiation, Cam had said, and Ruth felt the wild seesaw of emotions in her change again. She began to mourn. She hadn’t made many friends during her short time in Leadville, but the ISS crew was there along with nearly everyone else she knew in the world, James Hollister, her fellow researchers, and other people who had done their best to help. Four hundred thousand men and women. In all likelihood they had just been vaporized — and yet she felt ambivalent about Gary LaSalle and the weapons tech he’d developed in support of the insane, brutal schemes of Kendricks and the president’s council.
Was that what this was about? Who had launched the missile, the rebels? A foreign enemy?
Ruth laid her good hand on the dirt and traced her ‚ngers through one boot print, as if the broken tread marks were some sort of Braille. As if there were answers.
“It couldn’t be Colorado,” Mike said.
“Look, kid, somebody just shot off a few warheads!” Newcombe yelled. “You—”
Cam stopped them. “Easy,” he said. He had been quiet for several minutes and Ruth realized this wasn’t the ‚rst time she’d seen him step aside to gauge everyone’s state of mind before neatly solving a problem. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter!?” Alex shouted.
“Whatever happened, we have to decide what to do. I say we all get moving. Today. Now.” Cam gestured east into the valley below them. “We need to try to reach as many other people as possible and get off the mountains.”
For an instant, there was only the wind.
“Before there are more bombs,” Cam said.
“Yeah. Yeah, all right.” Newcombe glanced at the Scouts and their stunned faces, Mike with his hands still on his eyes, Brandon squeezing his palm against his bloody cheek.
“We split up,” Cam said. His voice was aggressive now, and he pointed at Ed and Alex. “Three groups. You, you, and us. That just makes the most sense.” He kept his back to the hole in the sky, staring at them instead. “We have to do this,” he said. “Get up. We’re going.”
* * * *
D Mac and Hiroki chased Ed back up to their camp to grab the rest of their packs and sleeping bags as Cam unwrapped his left hand again. He reopened the knife wound he’d made earlier, bleeding too much into a tin cup.
“No,” Samantha said to her brother. “Please, no.”
Brandon shook his head. “We can’t stay here, Sam. You know we can’t.”
Alex drank from the cup quickly and Kevin did the same, but Alex took it back from him when Samantha refused. “He’s right,” Alex said. “Come on. He’s right.”
“Stay with me,” she said.
The ground trembled lightly again and they heard one of boys shout on top of the mountain. Then the earth heaved. Ruth was still sitting down but immediately lost her balance. She thought she bounced. Cam and Newcombe slammed down on either side of her and someone kicked her arm, a bolt of pain. Her mind went white. Somewhere there was screaming, Samantha and Brandon and herself.
Gradually she realized it was over. She looked for Cam and saw his face bent with his own agony. He lay on his side, picking dirt out of the cut on his bad hand. Kevin groaned, testing his ankle. Ruth heard more yelling from above and Mike said, “What’s happening?”
“Every fault line on the continent might be letting go,” Newcombe said. “That’s my guess. Anyone see another †ash?”
They shook their heads.
“You guys all lived here,” Newcombe said. “Are we near any faults?”
“It’s California,” Mike said. “Yes.”
“The ‚rst quake was the bomb. Maybe the second one, too. I don’t know. Christ. Let’s hope it’s done.”
“Behind you,” Cam said.
In the east, morning had become night again. Ruth believed the vast distortion in the atmosphere was slowing down, but now a poisonous black stain crawled up from the farthest edge of the horizon, undulating after the shock wave. It rippled and popped, a thin, growing band of darkness.
It was fallout — pulverized debris that had brie†y turned hotter than the sun.
* * * *
Everyone drank, even Samantha, as they shouldered their packs and tucked away their knives and a few precious keepsakes. Hiroki had a shiny old quarter that he showed to Mike, then pressed into his hand as a gift. Brandon repeated the sudden gesture with his Giants hat, offering it to Alex.
Before they divided, the Scouts clutched at each other and shouted and cried. D Mac spontaneously turned to Cam and hugged him, too, and suddenly the children enveloped Ruth as well. Mike hurt her arm. Alex kissed her cheek.
It was the perfect farewell against the roiling sky. Ruth would not forget them or their courage, and she hoped that she would see them again. But as she started downhill after Cam, running east, Ruth clenched her ‚sts and wondered how far west the fallout might come toward them against the wind.
15
“Wait.” Cam moved quickly to his right, leading Ruth sideways over a log. The ropy brown snakes he’d seen probably weren’t rattlers. Gopher snakes looked very similar and had been more common before the plague, but he couldn’t chance it. Even nonvenomous bites would inject them with the plague and leave wounds that were vulnerable to more — and fresh blood might excite the bugs.
He helped her get her boots down. Then he kept his glove on her hip, looking for her eyes. Ruth was breathing hard inside her mask, but she kept her face down and all he saw was goggles and hood. His own gear seemed especially ‚lthy after the night on the mountain, feeling the cold on his naked skin.
Newcombe climbed over the log behind them. Cam turned away and hurried in front again, moving east, always east, using himself to sound their trail through the forest. He was totally recommitted to her now. Any thoughts of sending Ruth away on a plane had been a fantasy. The idea that he could stay here with the Scouts, slowly beginning to rebuild, ignored the need and desperation of the rest of the world. He should have known better. Of course Leadville’s enemies would attack. They’d only waited for the opportunity.
His guess was that it was the rebels. They’d taken out Leadville to end the competition to get Ruth. That was a good thing if they’d succeeded. He had to act as if they hadn’t. If help came, great. If not, leading her safely through this valley to the next mountaintop was all that was important. In twenty minutes they’d avoided a cloud of grasshoppers, more snakes, and two furious sprouts of ants bearing white eggs out of the ground. Black †ies continued to lose and ‚nd them among the pine trees. Cam hoped the Scouts hadn’t turned back. The quakes alone were bad enough and had yet to quit shuddering through the valley, agitating the reptiles and insects everywhere.
Newcombe was right. The bomb had acted like a hammer, triggering the worst fault lines. As those landmasses fell and clashed, they must have shoved against other regions and set off any weaknesses there. Once the chain reaction was done, California might be unusually stable for years, but for now the mountains rumbled and twitched. Cam was glad they’d escaped the lowlands. More of the failing dams an
d levees would collapse, adding to the destruction, and there must have been tidal waves along the coast and inside the Bay.
“Stay with me,” he said.
Ahead, another huge tree had fallen. Cam angled laterally across the slope instead of risking a way through. There were snake holes in the earth and that made him nervous. He kicked his boot into the pine needles and dirt, showering the fallen branches with debris to scare anything curled up out of sight.
But the movement he expected was overhead. The trees stiffened. Daylight winked.
It was as if God had touched the sky. A new current shushed through the forest from the east, countering the breeze, and in that moment Cam felt himself lose hope. Everything he’d accomplished before today had been set against the vast, lethal reaches of the plague, a few small men and women surrounded by empty miles or dead cities, but he had always had a chance to in†uence his fate.
I think I just saw another bomb, he tried to say, before Newcombe grabbed at them both and dragged Ruth to the ground. “Down!” Newcombe yelled.
Then another invisible front shoved through the trees, far more violent than the ‚rst warm puff of air. The forest moaned, lashed with dust and bugs and †ecks of wood and leaves. Cam rolled down and covered his face with his arms, choking despite his mask.
Just as swiftly the wind was gone. He stayed on the ground until his own paralysis scared him. He’d seen too many people give up, and that wasn’t how he wanted to die. He moved. He moved even though there didn’t seem to be much point, wincing at the abrasive grit in his eyes. He was caked in grime that he assumed was radioactive. The sun itself had dimmed, obscured by the sandstorm. Ruth and Newcombe hadn’t fared any better, although there were clean patches on her side where Newcombe had covered her body with his own. Otherwise they were brown like Cam with ‚lth in every crease in their jackets and hoods. It also stuck to the trees, discoloring the bark.
How long did they have left? Cam supposed it depended on how near the bomb had been. It might be days before the poison reduced them to bleeding invalids, but his next thought was the radio. He wondered if they could wire the extra batteries and rig it to broadcast for hours and hours after they were dead. Maybe there would be a survey plane. Maybe an evacuation out of Leadville’s forward base would †y close enough to hear. Somebody might ‚nd them, bad guys or good, and he’d rather have anyone secure the vaccine than let it be lost forever in this narrow mountain valley.