by Jeff Carlson
Sawyer touched his gloved finger beside a tight, hooked contour nearly a full square off-course.
“God.” Manny stopped working at his foot. “Oh God.”
Cam said, “That’s the crest we’re on?”
“Right.”
They had been led three-quarters of a mile farther west than necessary by an undulation of ravines that ran oceanward rather than directly down into the valley, allowing themselves to be channeled by the shapes of the mountain.
Cam shut his burning hand into a fist. “I’ll walk point with you, watch the compass while you keep an eye on the map.”
“Right.” Sawyer stood up and Cam rose beside him.
Manny also broke into motion again, frantically squeezing his foot and kneading his ankle.
Erin said, softly, “Can’t we just sit for five minutes?”
Cam bent and took her arm.
She went inside herself. Cam wasn’t sure how much time had passed since they’d worked down from the ridge—fifteen minutes, maybe; the sun was no higher than midmorning—but already Erin had bumped into him twice when he slowed to read the compass. She was tapping some reserve of energy.
Cam needed that second wind himself. They’d tromped through a hundred yards of wilting stalks before he remembered it was spring. This field of Mule’s Ear looked as if autumn had come. The yellow flowers, usually the size of a silver dollar, were just incomplete nubs—and the long, fleshy leaves that gave the plant its name had browned. Many were dry enough to crackle beneath his boots despite the storm runoff that made this meadow an uneven carpet of muck and puddles.
He’d seen no bees or butterflies this year, and wondered if the ants and reptiles had devoured every hive and slow-moving caterpillar. He wasn’t sure that a lack of pollinating bugs would doom these plants. Maybe a fungus was also to blame, or mites, or aphids...
Cam had nearly grasped the tremendous interlocking gestalt of it when mosquitoes gathered at the bottom edge of his goggles, a sudden fog probing for entry.
He slapped the spindly black cluster and twisted his mask. “Christ—”
Sawyer jumped and almost fell, turning to look back at him. Thirty small shadows clung to Sawyer’s face, his fabric mask stained with a wet comma over his mouth.
“What?” Sawyer said, and Cam reached out. Sawyer blocked his arm, the map flagging out from his hand in stiff paper zags, but none of these movements dislodged the bugs.
The bloodsuckers themselves were a minor threat, no more than an irritation. It was the bites that could kill. Each puncture might also drive nanos into their skin.
Cam mashed his gloves against his chin and forehead and turned to Erin. Her hood bristled with thin bodies like hair. Behind her, Bacchetti was already rubbing busily at himself. Manny lifted both hands before his eyes in disbelief.
“Oh shit,” Sawyer said.
“Run.” It was all Cam could think of. But they stood there for another instant, water chuckling somewhere among the dying plants. He bent to wipe his thighs and saw that inky living hair attached to his boots as well.
He stared, as Manny had.
The mosquitoes’ egg cycle must have been broken long ago. They lived no more than a few weeks, and the females needed blood to become fertile. Could they have adapted in such a short time to feed on soft-skinned frogs and salamanders? That seemed impossible. This entire species should have been wiped out except for some remainder of the breeds whose eggs lay dormant in mud until wetted by flooding.
Spring runoff. Christ. And Hollywood had probably suffered enough bites to fertilize five hundred females, each capable of birthing a thousand more—
Cam killed twenty with his hand and it meant nothing. He straightened up into a haze of bodies, squinting against their high, brittle whine. “Run.” He pushed Erin and she stumbled, crunching through two yards of Mule’s Ear. “Run!”
Manny bounded away, milling his arms, and they all broke after him. The mosquitoes were black snow.
Cam screamed when the blue jacket ahead of him disappeared, but then he saw another figure and changed course. He fell. He jumped up and Manny staggered into him, coming sideways across the slope. Cam began to shove at him, but Manny resisted. They went in different directions and Cam ran another forty yards before he realized that Bacchetti, to his left, was also moving laterally across the floodplain. West, into the wind.
Maybe it would be enough to push off the bugs.
He saw flashes of green and red disappear over a low rise, Sawyer and Erin. They might have yelled for him. He scrabbled after Manny to the top of the embankment.
They thrashed into the brush and lowest branches, shielding their goggles and masks with their forearms. These pines were different than any Cam had seen for twelve months, with thin needles and fragile orange soft cones that showered pollen over him. Each impact squashed mosquitoes by the dozens and chased away hundreds more.
He saw Bacchetti’s blue jacket and then spotted Erin ahead, a red figure working toward the sparsely wooded face of a hill. The wind would be stronger there.
Adrenaline was a poor substitute for real stamina. Cam made it to the slope, but the incline knocked his feet out from under him. He began to crawl. Then Manny helped him stand again and they struggled up.
At the crest, Erin lay on her side, heaving for air. Sawyer was still standing. There was nothing beyond them except more forest and rock bumps. Cam saw himself as a distorted blob in Sawyer’s mirrored lens when Sawyer stepped toward him, patting at his face and chest, killing the few bugs that still clung to him. Bacchetti was more clumsy, his efforts like punches.
“We have to keep moving,” Sawyer told them.
“The ridges,” Manny said, panting. “Stay on the ridges.”
“Right. If we can. Definitely keep away from water.”
“You think we’re near the road?”
Sawyer shook his head, untangling the torn map. He crouched and pinned the folds to the ground with his arms.
“We must be close,” Manny insisted.
But all the distance they’d hiked eastward again had been lost. They might even have run farther west than they’d been before. At least they had also fought a good ways downhill, north. The lodgepole pines and abundance of undergrowth were proof that they’d reached a lower altitude, more vivid to Cam than numbers on a map—6,600 feet. That was the benchmark nearest to the point where Sawyer’s tracing finger stopped.
“Maybe here,” Sawyer said.
The new sound on the wind didn’t register with Cam at first. They would need to head northwest to avoid the floodplain and the worst of the mosquitoes, but Highway 14 wasn’t more than a mile off. They could find a car.
A car. Cam turned his head. “Is that—”
The horn cried and cried again, a mockery of the coyotes who had once sung here. Then the howling became bleats.
“That’s Morse,” Manny said. “Ess oh ess.”
Three short, three long, three short. The pattern was obvious once the kid had pointed it out.
“Right.” Sawyer laughed and rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what the hell Price thinks we’re going to do for him. Look.” He slid his finger two and a half miles west, upwind. “Somehow they got onto this logging road.”
Cam said, “But it goes through.”
“Unless it’s blocked. Or they crashed.” Sawyer teetered noticeably when he rose to his feet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We can’t help them.”
11
There were surprisingly few bones in the forest, mostly just birds like elaborate little carvings. Their best theory was that every creature had tried to hide away. Squirrels and rabbits and fox had gone underground, while deer and coyotes disappeared into thickets. Birds had tucked themselves into brush and treetops only to be blown free later by the wind.
Humans had experienced that same burrowing impulse.
Each of the first six cars they came upon was a mass coffin, the stick shapes in
their matted, stained clothing invariably bunched together against the doors or in the floorwells. The smell would have been worse except that during the first spring, bugs had slipped in through vents and doorjambs, stripping the rotted flesh and often the upholstery as well.
Sawyer dragged the remains out by their legs or skulls or punched them deeper into the car, whatever was easiest. Keys dangled from every ignition—but every engine had been left running, heat on, lights on, radio on.
Four of the six vehicles were locked. At first Cam had giggled at the absurdity, yet his head swam each time he bent to find a rock and he nearly cut open his jacket when he broke the third window, too weak to disengage himself from the momentum of heaving his crude tool into the glass. He stared back at himself from the fourth window. Even hefting ten pounds of asphalt pried from the road’s edge, his posture was tight and defensive, shoulders hunched, head bent, as if making himself smaller would help in any way.
He understood locking the doors.
Every vehicle was a bitter frustration and Manny wasted time trying each ignition again after Sawyer had given up. Sawyer was all business, in and out, cranking each key three times. Only three times. Then he walked away.
The blacktop let them maximize every stride rather than fighting rocks and mud. They were also now on nearly level ground, the bottom of the valley, halfway there. Moving too slow. It was as if they were old now, bodies bent inefficiently.
Highway 14 was not a parking lot. At 6,200 feet, this road had been under several inches of snow, yet Cam imagined the lack of cars was due more to the fact that most people had been drawn off by Highway 6, farther down the valley...but if they couldn’t get an engine running soon, their only option would be to continue on foot up the northern face. Hollywood had said Route 47 was blocked in at least two places, anyway, but if they could ride all the way to the first obstacle...
Erin slumped against him, as heavy as dread. They’d come upon another vehicle, an old brown pickup half in the ditch, and Sawyer simply let go of her.
A fly smacked into Cam’s fogged lens. He blinked, awareness opening and closing in him like a lighthouse beacon. It hurt. He burned. Molten barbs swam through his hand and his wrist. The same fire distorted his ear, pushing the tissue apart.
Erin tried to sit and he clubbed uselessly at her side. Then Manny bumped past. Erin’s weight peeled away from Cam and he staggered, trying to soften her fall but desperate to stay upright himself. He looked at the others for help.
Sawyer had dragged a freakish little body from the pickup.
Cam stared, realized it was a dog, and Erin managed one word hardly different than breathing. “Rest.”
Bacchetti’s boots scuffed into Cam’s field of vision and the big man grumbled, encouraging the truck just as he’d talked to the flies. “Rrrrrrr. Rrrrr—” He coughed.
“Help,” Cam said. “Get her up.”
Bacchetti had already settled into a wide, braced stance. He might have been a little nuts but Cam was glad for his presence, glad for his strength and his loyalty—so it confused him when Bacchetti sidestepped away, until he heard other boots.
Together, Cam and Sawyer heaved their lover into a sitting position. Her eyes rolled open and the band of skin framed by her goggles crinkled in a familiar way. She was smiling.
“I can’t carry you,” Sawyer told her. “I won’t.”
“Please,” Cam said, maybe to both of them.
He’d studied the town so often from his favorite cliff that he thought he knew where he was going. The Forest Service and CalTrans shared a lot on the northeast side, a complicated zoo of chain-link fence populated with a limited variety of green trucks, orange trucks, and orange plows. They could get an engine running there for sure. It shouldn’t be hard to find. This place only had eight streets, a three-by-five grid set off-center on Highway 14, plus several curling back roads lined with old cabins and giant modern homes.
“Sick?” Erin said. Six. A wooden sign on metal stilts read
Welcome to Woodcreek
pop. 2273, elev. 6135.
Bacchetti continued to help Cam each time Sawyer tried another car, stepping in to keep Erin upright, but the big man had stopped making his engine sounds. He coughed whenever he did. He coughed constantly now.
The fucking things were in his lungs.
Regret filled the core of emotion that Cam maintained inside himself, banked against his despair in the same way they’d learned to protect the embers of their cookfires. Bacchetti had been the real surprise, the surprise hero, and Cam hoped somehow he would make it.
Woodcreek seemed remarkably well preserved. Two homes had burned and there was a jeep rammed up on a guardrail, but anyone who’d died here had hidden themselves away.
The ghosts came out as they reached downtown. Their feet echoed down every road, and shadows paced alongside them in the dusty storefront windows.
Then Sawyer got a van to turn over. Tucked between a deli and an antiques shop, the white Ford would not idle, dying again and again. He pumped the gas and tried shifting into neutral or first, giving the van more time than the last three cars put together. But it just wouldn’t catch.
They detoured left when they wanted to go straight, avoiding a huge nest of rattlers sunning in the street. The thick, brown, ropy bodies held their ground when Manny waved his arms and yelled in a pleading voice—“Go! Move!”—and the ghosts began to talk.
They were not alone in Woodcreek.
The mumbling and whispers became real words as Cam hurried Erin into an intersection, Bacchetti dragging on her other arm. He actually looked the wrong way first, tricked by the silhouettes in the glass of a real estate office.
McCraney’s urgency was clear. “Heard him—”
“—doing, you know, we don’t—” Hollywood saw them and lifted both arms overhead. “Hey.”
Cam shouted back, “Hah!”
They were seventy feet off, standing in a bunch on the sidewalk. He recognized Silverstein and Jocelyn Colvard and that was as much counting as he could manage. All twelve seemed to have made it.
Price had been right. Jim Price had made the best choice. Yes, these people had gotten stuck farther west of Cam’s group—they must have, or they would’ve driven into town an hour ago—but while both groups had hiked roughly the same distance, the miles that Price covered on foot had been the last part of the logging road and then the easy surface of Highway 14.
Even better, Price hadn’t wasted time trying to get any cars started. It must have been obvious, doors open, bones scattered, that each vehicle had already been tested. Every failure and disappointment had been a help to them.
The surge of gladness in Cam carried him forward despite Erin’s weight and she moaned, “Stop.”
He knew that she hurt. He knew she wanted to sleep. It was smarter to keep moving. The others would need to come up the street to reach the CalTrans station, but he wanted to see their eyes. That was worth fifty steps.
Erin let her legs go limp and Cam and Bacchetti sagged together, holding her up. “Stop,” she said.
“Get back!” Sawyer yelled behind them.
Cam felt his thoughts open and close again, and realized suddenly that Hollywood had not raised his arms in welcome. The boy had made himself larger as a warning.
The knot of people on the sidewalk shifted, retreating, leaving three men in front like fence posts. Price. Nielsen. Silverstein. An open doorway stood at Nielsen’s elbow and above it jutted a touristy Old West sign. the hunting post.
Price held his rifle down alongside his leg as if its heft was too much for him, and Silverstein’s long torso had kept the outline of his weapon from showing. Only the tip of its muzzle poked above his shoulder. Nielsen’s hands were oversized, a pistol in each, the barrels like stiff ugly fingers.
“Get back,” Sawyer called again, to Cam, and Silverstein screamed, “You get back! Stay away from us!”
Cam had never heard Doug Silverst
ein speak in any way except a controlled manner, not even during their worst arguments, and the hysteria made him seem like an imposter.
There was more. Silverstein was shorter, hunched to one side. Price made a familiar slashing wave yet stayed silent.
These were not the same people Cam had left on the mountain.
Hollywood’s voice held no trace of the confident madman who’d crossed this valley for them. “Just go away,” he said. He sounded lost. He sounded old.
Sawyer ignored him. “Put ’em down, Price.”
“Get out of here!” Silverstein brayed.
Then Bacchetti coughed and there was an answering hack from someone at the rear of the other group. A weak, wet rasp. It could have been enough to reunite them. Their suffering was the same. It had always been that way.
But Sawyer yelled again, “Put the guns down!”
Caught between them, Cam was afraid to move or speak. Motivation came from a sharper fear. Sawyer and Price, here, now, had only one conclusion.
Sawyer and Price had too much hate between them.
Cam flicked his gaze over his shoulder, shaping words inside his crowded head before he reconsidered making himself a target. Manny had followed them down the block and stood ten yards back. Sawyer was still in the intersection but stepped close to a blue mailbox with his revolver.
“Come on, hey,” Hollywood said, louder now. His intent must have been the same as Cam’s, but the poor deluded ass-hole had never understood the depth of the fear and resentment among them. They had tried to conceal it from him, yet Hollywood had also willingly ignored a thousand clues.
The boy repeated his words, “Hey, hey,” and his voice seemed to stir Price, who directed nonsense at Sawyer.
Price said, “Took too long, killer.”
The bewilderment in Cam resolved into a fleeting memory of Chad Loomas, the second man they’d murdered and eaten. But they had all eaten. They had all wanted the stew. What had Price been telling Hollywood, redirecting the blame?
“Killed her,” Price muttered again. Cam had misunderstood, deafened by his own guilt. Lorraine. Price must be talking about Lorraine; too long meant hijacking the pickup truck.