Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  He looked for her but the people behind Price were too similar, all hoods and goggles. Apparently she was missing. “I helped her, Jim, her arm, remember?”

  “Spic.”

  Cam hadn’t heard that curse since the end of the world. In all their time together, all their confrontations, no one had ever condemned him out loud for the color of his skin—and it meant nothing now except that whatever remained of Jim Price had been burned down to something base and primitive.

  “You goddamn spic, you faggots, you killed her.” Price waggled his right arm, his rifle. “Faggots,” he said.

  Something happened behind Cam. He saw Silverstein and Nielsen react together. Silverstein pulled his rifle from his shoulder and pushed it forward like a spear, as Nielsen lifted both pistols.

  Cam moved. He yanked hard on Erin’s arm as he turned and Bacchetti came with them, one step, two.

  Sawyer stood behind the mailbox now, his revolver leveled.

  “Get away, get away!” Silverstein screamed, and Hollywood said, “Come on, hey, just let them—”

  Sawyer fired first.

  12

  Bacchetti stayed with Erin and Cam. Otherwise they would have fallen. Erin managed only a cramped, kicking motion as they began to run, and Cam put his boot down on her ankle. Then Bacchetti hauled her forward and Cam regained his balance. That first gunshot still had yet to roll beyond their hearing.

  They were twenty feet from the end of the block but it looked like forever, a wide, flat-walled canyon. Sawyer’s revolver barked again and stamped a hundred details into Cam’s mind; screams behind him; the square shadows of the buildings painted on the street. A rifle cracked and Nielsen’s pistols stuttered pop pop pop pop—

  All three of them instinctively ducked and Bacchetti dodged sideways, pushing Erin into Cam. The noise felt like a solid thing, each slap backed by a crazy weave of echoes.

  The corner building was brick. They ducked past it and fell together as the noise disappeared. There were still human sounds—hysteria, the ragged screech of someone hurt—but the shooting had stopped.

  Unsteady even on his hands and knees, bumping against the rough brick, Cam looked for Manny first. He saw Sawyer across the intersection on this same crossroad, crouched against a shop wall, a barbershop, busy with something in his lap. Reloading. Cam’s face mask had pulled down over his chin and he reset it as he poked his head around the corner.

  Silverstein had come several paces after them, still holding his rifle away from his lanky torso. He lurched stiffly, trying not to disturb the nano infection in his gut. “Get away!” he screamed. “Getaway getaway!”

  Price didn’t appear to have moved, rifle leveled. Someone near him ran into the hunting shop. Everybody else was down, either wounded or making themselves as small as possible, bright jackets like human confetti strewn over the asphalt.

  Some of the confetti moved, crabbing away, kicking in agony.

  Manny was a blue figure between Silverstein and Cam, his goggles ripped from his thin, bloody face. The kid had been smart enough not to run for Sawyer’s corner, even though he’d been closer to that side of the street. Most of the fire must have been directed back at Sawyer’s gun, but at least one stray round had caught Manny nevertheless—or maybe he’d been too slow, too easy, hopscotching on that bad foot. Maybe Nielsen had targeted him in frustration when Sawyer escaped. Maybe Price had done it from spite.

  The kid was alive. His body was bent as if he’d been thrown from a great height, chest down, hips turned on their side, but he was alive. He looked like he was still trying to run or maybe dreaming of running. Both legs worked pathetically and he inched one blue-sleeved arm over the filthy road.

  In his heart, Cam said good-bye.

  “Getawayyy getawayyyy!” The yelling was more frightened than frightening, and deprived Silverstein of any element of surprise as he paced closer. Silverstein had lost his mind.

  Sawyer knew exactly what he was doing. Sawyer had always known. He looked across the intersection at Cam, hefting his revolver and pointing with his free hand. He walked two fingers, then tapped down on them with the weapon’s short barrel.

  Club him if he comes up your side of the street.

  The clarity of the idea, just the act of communicating, gave Cam focus. He slipped out of his daypack. The canteen in it was no more than ten pounds, but it was the only weapon he had. He balled his hand around the top of one shoulder strap to give himself as much reach as possible, then glanced back for Erin, not sure what he would see.

  Both she and Bacchetti were in ready crouches and she bobbed her head once, the way Sawyer always did, like once was plenty. Cam nodded back. He knew then that he genuinely loved her.

  “Getawayyy!” The warning cry sounded no closer.

  Cam dared to lean over, peering through the chink between two bricks. Silverstein was still reeling around the beast in his stomach but he’d altered his direction, patrolling a line across the street instead of continuing to advance on them.

  Cam’s eyes went to Manny again, left out there like a bloody sack of garbage. It should have been Price. It should have been Sawyer. The idea resounded through him with no sign of madness, quiet and clear and definite.

  It should have been Price and Sawyer.

  Most of the people lying on the ground were rising now, and clustered around the two figures who remained prone. One of them was alive, a woman named Kelly Chemsak. She sobbed when Atkins and McCraney hoisted her up. The other casualty was Nielsen, the big gory splotches on his torso turned purple by his yellow jacket. No one wasted any time on him. Jocelyn grabbed a pistol trapped under Nielsen’s shoulder as George Waxman emerged from the hunting shop with two shotguns.

  Hollywood was backing away. Cam noticed him first as motion separate from the group, a good distance behind everyone else. Then Hollywood turned and ran. He ran back the way that Price’s group had come, away from Cam, away from them all.

  Heads turned. Silverstein turned.

  It was an opportunity. “Go,” Cam said, heaving himself into the open. He didn’t have enough left to help Erin.

  His knee buckled on the first step, nearly dropping him.

  Bacchetti and Erin went past immediately, leaning on each other, and the best that Cam could do was an uneven skipping like Manny.

  He heard Price shout. Halfway there. But the first shot came again from in front of him.

  Sawyer had leaned out around his corner and put two quick bullets down the street, then two more as Erin and Bacchetti made it to safety beyond him. Cam swung his arm into Sawyer’s chest as he dived for the sidewalk and they fell in a tangle.

  “Watch it!”

  “Stop—” But he had no breath in him.

  Sawyer crawled back to the edge of the barbershop, even though looking out to shoot meant exposing himself to their fire. Cam could never have done it. The voices and scuffling down the block might have been retreating or charging closer, a hundred feet away or only five. Why not just run away? Why force a standoff in this place as the nanos chewed through them?

  He saw his answer in the outline of Sawyer’s figure against the brick building across the intersection.

  Sawyer had taken a bizarre interest in fashion during the past week, showing Cam and Erin different jackets from their stash of extra clothing. It’s new, it’ll keep you drier, he’d insisted, but Erin loved her soft-worn puffy red coat and Cam had been unwilling to give up his old ski patrol jacket—his orange jacket, designed with visibility as one of its main functions.

  Sawyer’s green jacket and brown snowboarding pants had camouflaged him well in the forest. He was no less noticeable than any of them here, yet he had prepared himself as best he could. He had anticipated a need to run and hide.

  Cam leaned toward his old friend across the cement.

  Sawyer didn’t react, focused entirely in the opposite direction. Sawyer rocked his head past the edge of the barbershop and brought his revolver up�
��

  “Don’t,” Cam said, catching his other arm. “Jesus, don’t.”

  “Get off me!”

  “Just let them go.”

  “Fucking stupid, go where? Go where, Cam?” Sawyer shifted closer, back behind the corner, lifting his hand as if to keep the .38 from Cam. It was also a position that would allow him to bring the revolver’s weight down like a hammer. “Goddammit, I could’ve gotten a couple more! They probably took off by now!”

  Cam stayed very still, staring up into Sawyer’s mirrored goggles. He was so busy doing this that he barely registered the news that the others had fled. Good news.

  Sawyer said, “Next time we might not see them coming.”

  Cam nodded, but the motion was only reflex. Agree with him.

  “You have to help me!”

  “CalTrans. Let’s just get to the CalTrans station.”

  “You have to help me,” Sawyer said again, lowering the gun. After another moment he shifted away from Cam and peeked around the corner. Then he stood, in stages, grabbing at the shop wall. And when he was up, he held out his other hand.

  Cam didn’t hesitate. It was difficult to follow a chain of logic through the shock and pain crammed through his body, but he saw little choice except to run off like Hollywood, and then what? Price would shoot him on sight, now or later, here or on top of the mountain. Sawyer was right about that—and maybe Sawyer had saved them by firing first. It was good to think so. Yes. Sawyer had saved him.

  He held on to this decision in the same way that he clung to Sawyer’s hand, pulling himself up.

  There were four bodies sprawled in the street now, Manny and Nielsen and two others, and he had seen Kelly Chemsak wounded. That left eight, maybe fewer if Sawyer had winged anyone else, and David Keene had been infected early, so he would be weak... They might not be outgunned by more than four or five people...

  The reversal in Cam was swift and powerful. This wasn’t who he wanted to be. It would be a very small tragedy compared to everything else that had happened, but there was a way out of this box. There was a third alternative.

  “I need a gun,” he said, with just the right reluctance.

  Kill Sawyer. Kill Sawyer now and shout it to the others, that should be enough to end this war.

  Erin’s groaning turned his head, yet his gaze caught on Sawyer’s mirrored face and Sawyer bobbed his head once, ignoring her sounds. “We both need rifles,” Sawyer said, “in case they come at us from a distance.”

  He gestured with his revolver for Cam to start walking, but Cam found it impossible to turn his back. Sawyer depended on his own paranoia the way that most people used their hearing or their sight. Sawyer needed an ally, but he might have decided that Cam was unreliable. He might just drop Cam here in the street with the rest of the dead and go on alone.

  Cam made a show of hobbling on his bad leg and reached for Sawyer’s shoulder. Sawyer stepped closer. His sweat smell was strong and evoked memories of bed.

  “We can do it,” Sawyer told him. “We’re going to make it.”

  Breath went in and out of Manny in rapid huffs. Cam saw blood high on the kid’s back and on his thigh, dark stains beneath his jacket and pants.

  “It’s us or them,” Sawyer said. “It’s that simple.”

  Manny lay facing the other way and Cam felt relief, then shame and horror. Were the kid’s eyes open? Was he listening to them? Cam expected him to roll over at any moment, and then what would they do?

  The next body was Silverstein, shot in the back. In fact, Nielsen seemed to be the only one who hadn’t been trying to run away. Nielsen embraced the sky, arms open like a bird, but Silverstein had collapsed facedown with his rifle at his feet.

  Cam pushed off from Sawyer and took three steps before he remembered he was exaggerating his limp. He almost glanced back. He bent, and closed his good hand on the smooth wooden stock—

  “You have to help me,” Sawyer insisted.

  Kill him.

  “I was part of the design team that built the nano. Cam? I was one of the people who built it.”

  He paused, tensing to spin around as he came up.

  “Cam? Listen to me.”

  Silverstein wasn’t dead, either. Life wasn’t like the movies, pow, one shot in the belly and you’re gone. The resiliency of the human body was amazing. Sometimes it would continue to fight even when the will was gone.

  Doug Silverstein had lost consciousness and his lungs gurgled badly, but he might last for hours. He might wake here, alone, as the machine plague devoured him.

  Cam shifted his rifle to the man’s head. He couldn’t have said when he’d started crying.

  “No! You’ll just let them know where we are!” Sawyer grabbed his shoulder. “Are you listening to me? We were going to beat cancer in two years, we were that close. I swear. We had everything right in the pipeline.”

  “What...”

  “Just get me to the radio. I swear. I can show Colorado how to stop it, but you have to help me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I built the nano, Cam. I built it and I’m probably the only person alive who can stop it.”

  13

  Sawyer rarely spoke of who he had been, who and what he’d left behind, but that was not unusual or any cause for suspicion. Many of them had abandoned their pasts.

  Sawyer had always taken an authoritative stance regarding the plague but he seemed to be knowledgeable about the workings of almost anything mechanical, diesel engines, radio reception, and he had argued like an engineer when they were building their huts, pointing out drainage and foundation problems.

  Cam had never worried about it, not even during the light-less days of winter when his mind stole away from their reeking hut and came back remembering the wildest fantasies as actual memory. Everyone talked about the plague. Everyone had theories. His long-lost buddy Hutch had read enough articles about nanotech to spout impressive factoids as they watched the first confused reports on TV. Manny offered plausible ideas based on nothing more than comic books and Star Trek.

  There was no question that Sawyer seemed smarter about the problem than anybody else, but Sawyer had always been smarter than everyone about everything.

  Kneeling in Doug Silverstein’s blood, Cam rejected all of the easy questions. Four thousand feet into the invisible sea was no place for an interrogation. Colorado, Sawyer had said. Radio. That had been his first demand of Hollywood, seventeen days ago, Is there a two-way radio?

  He knew Sawyer would say and do anything to save himself—but this, this would be such a crazy lie, such a risk, all or nothing.

  The crafty son of a bitch knew exactly how to play him.

  Cam looked up. Sawyer hadn’t moved from his side, waiting on a verdict.

  “Hurry,” Cam said.

  Sawyer nodded and strode away toward Nielsen’s body and the gun shop. Cam might have shot him then. Instead, he rummaged through Doug Silverstein’s pockets for extra ammunition, and the man jerked at his touch. It should have been awful.

  It was nothing.

  Cam had regained his feet before Sawyer stepped out into sunlight again, cradling two pistols and another rifle. Then they shuffled back up the street toward Erin and Bacchetti.

  “You ran,” Cam said. How else had Sawyer reached safe altitude? Without a head start, he would have been trapped in the cities or on the chaotic highways with all those millions of others. “You ran instead of trying to help.”

  “I had nothing to do with it getting loose.”

  “But you ran.”

  “Everything that, everyone...It wasn’t my fault.”

  Cam pressed him again. “You said you can stop it.”

  “I swear. I’ve worked out a way to turn the nano against itself. Here.” Sawyer touched one of the pistols to his head. “Archos is a highly adaptable template, that was the whole point. We can rework—”

  “Why didn’t you stop it before?”

  “Right.
On the goddamn mountain? You don’t build nano keys out of dirt.”

  “Before. Why didn’t you do anything before.”

  “There wasn’t time! It’s not something we’re going to bang out in an afternoon! I didn’t get any more warning than anyone, I swear it. It wasn’t my fault.”

  Cam said nothing. They’d nearly reached the corner, and he didn’t want Bacchetti to overhear.

  Sawyer was for real. Sawyer was telling the truth. He was more than canny enough to bury a secret of such magnitude— they would have killed him if they knew—but he had never been much of an actor, letting his contempt and superiority show even after those traits became a danger to the survival of their threesome.

  Cam had hated him before. Cam had mistrusted Sawyer enough that, ultimately, he had been ready to silence him with a bullet. It was the anger of love betrayed. In many ways their bond had been the most intimate of Cam’s life, past or present. They were family in every way that counted.

  He knew he’d carry the bastard if he had to.

  Cam and Bacchetti hooked Erin’s elbows around their necks, dragging down on both wrists, and she walked with a new determination just to relieve the stretching and tearing of her gut. Somewhere inside she had ruptured.

  He supposed the cure wasn’t as close as he dreamed. She wasn’t falling just short of the finish line. It isn’t something we’ll bang out in an afternoon. Still, her suffering was a waste. He and Sawyer could have come across the valley alone, perhaps with Hollywood to guide them.

  Of course that was exactly what Sawyer had fought for. Let ’em stay. He’d said it again and again.

  Cam was the one who convinced the entire group to try.

  We’ll never make it. He barely got here and he’s not half-starved! Whose voice was that? Lorraine. Dead for no reason. She could have stayed on the mountain, too. They all could have stayed if they had only known.

  Two blocks to the CalTrans station. Two blocks and Erin could sit and rest.

  Sawyer ranged ahead, shoulders cocked like a man pushing into a stiff breeze. Cam wondered how bad he had it. Not bad enough. It was insane but he wanted Sawyer to look at her. The back of that green jacket was an insult, and Cam tried to hurry her moaning weight forward. “Wait,” he said. “Hey!”