Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  Cam would never know how Jim Price had fallen. Life wasn’t like TV, where hero and villain were inevitably, neatly brought together for a stylish mano-a-mano duel. It wasn’t even possible in this situation to determine which of them was the hero.

  Price must have gotten stuck too far east up the valley. Driving out of Woodcreek had been the wrong choice after all, and Price and the rest had died for that decision.

  Sawyer, as always, had been right even in the final extreme. The few people on this mountain had listened to the shoot-out in the valley and assumed there were good guys and bad—and by carrying Hollywood with them, Cam and Sawyer had cloaked themselves in the illusion of his friendship and his trust.

  They’d fought, they said, because Price planned on making himself king. Price and his supporters had raided a gun shop in Woodcreek, and they stood up to him despite being outnumbered, and their friends died for it. Erin. Manny. Bacchetti.

  Maureen softened as he described Hollywood’s days with them. “So Eddie finally got someone to call him that,” she said, lowering her eyes to the floor, and she traded stories of her own to help Cam through his healing.

  In the next room Sawyer wept and Sawyer screamed, waking Cam, a constant disturbance, but Cam’s sympathy was for himself and for the dead and for these good, generous people.

  Sawyer deserved to suffer.

  Eddie Kokubo had invented greater reasons for fighting across the invisible sea, but Maureen believed that his first and most powerful motivation had been heartbreak. Eddie just hadn’t fit in here. The four adults were married couples, the youngest of them thirty-three, and the oldest of the children was only eleven. There had been another man but during the first spring he had finally succumbed to liver damage, and none of the other people who’d staggered up onto this mountain at the outset of the plague had lasted more than a week, devastated by internal injuries.

  From the beginning, eighteen-year-old Eddie was never purposely excluded—except when the kids were caught up in games that were too silly for him; except when the adults did their real planning; except each night when everyone went to bed.

  They were not completely alone. They saw smoke from cookfires on a bump to the northeast, and watched Cam’s group to the south through binoculars.

  Cam had fretted at that, but didn’t ask. Did you see us butchering each other? When he got outside he peered southward himself. His favorite cliff was visible, along with several crests and ridgelines, yet the majority of that small peak canted west and south away from this mountain. He detected no hint of the stay-behinds, no smoke, no motion, but they would be saving fuel for the winter and in any case he spared few glances for his old home after being sure that even more of his lies were safe. The valley between hurt him too deeply.

  Month after month Eddie had wasted batteries trying to raise them on the ham radio, wasted wood and grass making smoke signals. He built flag towers and laid out giant words in rock—and then one morning he was gone, leaving only a note signed with his bold, chosen name. Hollywood.

  That night they lit a row of bonfires to alert the people across the valley or to help poor Eddie find his way home. His journey was both foolish and grand, of course—it was entirely adolescent—and yet he’d been vindicated beyond even his wildest imaginings.

  Without Eddie, Sawyer might never have reached a radio.

  The two Special Forces medics examined Cam first in the semi-privacy of the cargo plane, while the other soldiers let the kids get in the way as they set up tents and dug a fire pit. If these corpsmen were less educated than Dr. Anderson, their supplies made up for it. They re-dressed the stubborn, swollen divot of rash under Cam’s right arm and gave him wide-spectrum antibiotics that they warned could cause diarrhea, Anderson agreeing that the risk of dehydration was better than relying on his wasted immune system to overcome the infection.

  The medics didn’t even attempt to deal with his dental problems. Across the valley they had eaten all of the toothpaste they’d found on scavenging trips, and Cam had been chewing lightly on a cavity for months now. The bits of floss he’d shared with Erin and Sawyer, the few brushes they’d worn down to nothing, had probably kept him from developing worse trouble—but toward the end of his climb, nano infestations had destroyed his gums along the upper left of his mouth. His eyetooth and the molar behind it were loose, dying. Both would need to come out soon, and the gap would further deform the contours of his face.

  When he emerged from the plane, Ruth and the other two scientists were questioning Maureen. They turned, however, and the loud one, D.J., immediately hammered at him: “Where is Sawyer’s lab? Do you know the street address?”

  Cam had expected impatience, but this guy was nervous. All of them. Why? Not for a lack of guns.

  And that wasn’t a question they should have asked.

  Ruth quickly intervened, glaring at D.J. “I need to sit down,” she said. “I’m tired. Can we all just sit down and talk?”

  Cam nodded, and they walked with D.J. and Todd to the downhill side of the road, not far from the planes or the cabin—or the two Marines who followed the scientists over. This berm of hardpack and crumbling granite had become Cam’s favorite spot; favorite because the kids came here often, noisily rooting for quartz; favorite because the views were west, away from Bear Summit.

  Neither D.J. nor Todd was much for conversation, though.

  D.J. didn’t know how to listen and Todd didn’t open his mouth, scratching and scratching at the blot of old scarring on his nose, looking anywhere except at Cam’s ruined profile.

  “We’re going to beat the plague,” Ruth said, “I swear,” but Cam barely glanced up from the rock he’d picked up, a shard of milky quartz shot through with orange-black veins of iron.

  Sunset would be unspectacular today, no clouds, the yellow sun falling to the edge of the world without changing in hue or strength. The grasshoppers sang and sang and sang.

  “We were already close,” Ruth insisted. “Close enough to test out in lab conditions.”

  He nodded. It was everything he wanted to hear. But his reaction to their arrival was not what he’d hoped, and he turned the gleaming white rock over again in his gnarled hands.

  He had thought he was beyond self-pity, yet found himself avoiding Ruth’s eyes. She stared at him with the same open wonder as the children, and spoke with compassion and an astonishing deference, which affected him in ways that D.J.’s disgust did not. Because it was undeserved. Because disgust was all that he felt for himself, for his appearance, for his past.

  This bright, daring woman would never have been so respectful if she knew the truth.

  Few men would have considered Ruth pretty, but she was healthy and trim and dedicated. Cam wanted to like her, which was exactly why he couldn’t trust her. Not yet.

  “You’re with the rebels,” he said matter-of-factly, just to get a reaction. It didn’t matter. Sawyer was theirs, unless somebody flew in and shot all of these soldiers. Jesus. No wonder they were in such a rush.

  Ruth seemed startled, but didn’t shy away when he lifted his gaze. “What? No, we’re from Leadville.”

  “Then you should know.”

  D.J. interrupted. “This is bullshit. Just tell us.”

  “You should know.” Cam didn’t have any idea where to find Sawyer’s lab, and he had been definite about that fact with his radio contacts. Sawyer refused to share the location until they came for him, until they treated him, until they took him wherever he would be well fed and protected and clean.

  Cam had begged Dr. Anderson to call Colorado before he even told them his own name, identifying Sawyer first. Unfortunately, ham radio wasn’t like picking up the phone. The family who’d lived here kept a transceiver for recreation and for emergencies, and it had more-than-sufficient wattage to bridge the distance—but unless there was someone waiting at the right time on the right frequency, a broadcast was no more effective than a prayer. And these days, nearly all radio
traffic was on military and federal bands. No one was monitoring amateur channels.

  The International Space Station would have been an ideal relay, and the survivors here had spoken to the astronauts several times during the past year, so they began transmitting on a diligent, revolving schedule, certain that they’d intercept one of the rapid orbits overhead. But the ISS never responded.

  They had also developed several contacts on the ground, both near and remote. Within ten days they’d raised some again. None could help. Most were just as helpless, stuck on scattered high points along the coast, while those in the Rockies had strived all this time to remain uninvolved with Leadville or its enemies.

  Cam was aware of the slow-developing civil war along the Continental Divide. Hollywood had shared his limited knowledge of it, a distant curiosity, but those hostilities confused their attempts to reach across seven hundred miles.

  The silence became an invisible sea in his mind, wide and desolate, into which they ventured each night when reception was best—but nights passed while atmospheric activity prevented them from sending a clear signal. Nights passed in which they chased down intermittent contacts only to be dismissed as a hoax or simply too far away.

  Finally, three weeks after their arrival on this mountain, Cam and Sawyer spoke with a nanotech expert in Leadville named James Hollister. Open broadcasts could be intercepted by anybody on the same wavelength, however, and Cam had been prepared to see someone other than Leadville fly in— someone who might have heard only parts of their conversations.

  “Seems like Hollister would’ve told you what we told him,” Cam said, and D.J.’s eyebrows rippled in anger.

  “You’ll get your price,” D.J. said. “Whatever you want.”

  “I want to know where you’re from.”

  “Hey, come on.” Ruth tried to elbow D.J. with her cast and shrug at Cam at the same time. Busy lady. “We’re all on the same side here,” she said.

  He remembered when he had played the peacemaker.

  “James told us only Sawyer knew what city,” she explained. “We just hoped you were holding out. We weren’t exactly Miss Manners about it, though.”

  A joke? Cam glanced up, but she’d turned to D.J. now, directing her sarcasm at him. Then Ruth and D.J. both looked over their shoulders, hearing footsteps that Cam’s bad ear perceived a moment later.

  Maureen moved softly across the road behind them at a funny, sidestepping angle, avoiding the two soldiers nearby.

  “He’s awake,” Maureen said.

  23

  Ruth was uncomfortable with her sense of fate and its grip on her increased as they walked toward the cabin. Mostly this odd mood was rising anticipation, a conflict of relief and worry that at last it was time. But there was something more. She identified with Cam—so cursed, so lucky—in ways she was still only beginning to realize.

  Maybe she would have felt this same quiet empathy for anyone in his place, but it was an extensive chain of events that had brought them together. Her step-father would have called it providence. Too much circumstance, too many choices and accidents outside their individual lives.

  “You’re going to have to take this slow,” Cam told D.J., and Ruth immediately said, “That’s not a problem, whatever you want.”

  “Just follow my lead.”

  And yet, she thought, the prime factor in her being here now, this evening, was really only the dumb force of nature. Until the plague year humankind had forgotten, in their cities, in their comfort, the godlike hand of the seasons.

  It was winter that had dictated this encounter.

  Only spring thaw had allowed Cam and Sawyer to cross the valley, and only spring thaw had allowed the shuttle to touch down. Thaw had allowed the Russo-Muslim and Chinese-Indian wars to resume on the other side of the planet.

  Cam limped, favoring his right leg. At the cabin’s front steps he stopped and turned, blocking their way, not even looking at D.J. yet sticking an arm out to corral him as D.J. tried to go around. “Wait,” Cam said. He was watching Hernandez and the two medics hurry over from the cargo plane, followed by Dr. Anderson and all four children and several more soldiers.

  D.J. took offense. “We don’t have to—”

  “I said wait.” Cam’s burned face lacked expression, and his tone was level, but his shoulders canted forward and D.J. shut up and moved back.

  Both of their Marine guards closed in, the nearest bumping Todd in his hurry. She saw Cam’s gaze flick between the soldiers once, twice. Then he dropped his arm from D.J.’s path.

  The grasshoppers filled the quiet, ree ree ree ree ree, as busy and insistent as her thoughts.

  Lord knew he was a mystery, his inconsistencies. He had been firm with Hernandez, overriding the major’s initial request to see Sawyer, and he had been equally tough with D.J., and clearly he was dangerous. Yet he was gentle with her. Because she had been so polite or merely because she was female?

  It would be impossible, she supposed, for him not to have become horrendously self-conscious.

  D.J. acted like he couldn’t see past the scarring but Cam was smart enough, aware enough, to concern Ruth. He had guessed after just thirty minutes that something was off between them and Leadville. How? Could he be that sensitive to tensions?

  He was young, Todd’s age, but he had kept himself alive where so many others had died, and she imagined that was an education of a kind that few could match.

  Plague Year. In this place, the name was fitting, and Ruth felt that cold sense of distance in herself again. She had been lucky. It was a strange thought after so much hardship and death, but she had been very lucky all this time.

  “Major,” Cam said, as Hernandez arrived with his small crowd. “We can’t take all these people inside.”

  Hernandez was affable. “The kids aren’t going, hermano.”

  He’d used that word before. What did it mean, sir or some equivalent of gentleman? Ruth knew amigo, that was friend, but she believed it would be more like Hernandez to treat Cam formally even as he tried to manipulate him.

  Hernandez had done the same with her.

  Cam shook his head once, an efficient no. “Two or three people besides me, that’s it. That has to be it. And the camera and stuff stay out here.”

  One soldier had brought recording equipment, a handheld family minicam, a larger video camera, a tripod, a batch of wireless clip microphones and extra tapes and batteries.

  Hernandez studied Cam briefly. Then he shook his head, too. “I’m afraid I’m on orders,” he said.

  They compromised. Hernandez was adamant that the three scientists go in, but reduced the support staff to himself and the audio/video gear to one camera.

  Ruth followed Cam into the shadows of the front room, the living room, and crossed through with only an impression of neatness. Then he held out his hand again and ducked into an adjacent bedroom alone.

  Beneath the not-unpleasant reek of woodsmoke, she smelled old sweat and grime. Hernandez raised his minicam and thumbed the record button with a small chime, apparently as a test. He lowered it five seconds later. D.J. glanced around with one eyebrow up and Todd rocked on his heels, sort of pacing without really moving.

  Much like Ruth’s quarters at Timberline, this cabin seemed empty of furniture. No couch, no chairs, all used for firewood. A pair of sleeping bags lay folded on the hardwood floor near the fireplace, no doubt for two of the children, and on some shelving built into the wall was the ham radio.

  The sight of it filled her with that quiet, uneven sorrow again. Gustavo might have heard these people directly if he had only monitored amateur frequencies in the first week and a half of Cam’s attempts to make contact. Evidently Gustavo’s voice had filled this room more than once. But in mid-April, Gus had been occupied with military transmissions and preparing for their landing—and then the ISS had been empty.

  What if they had spoken? She wouldn’t be here, maybe none of them, not even the Special Forces unit substi
tuted into their escort. The council would already have Sawyer and his equipment.

  It could still happen. James would cover for them, telling Kendricks that she was busy if the senator asked, dampening any rumors in Timberline; but the listening devices throughout the labs would inevitably catch word of who was missing, and Ruth had to assume the tapes were scanned daily.

  New orders could come at any moment, alerting Hernandez to the traitors around him.

  Or there might be another plane flying out right now.

  “Okay,” Cam said, turning Ruth’s head. He gestured with one scabby claw. “He’s doing okay.”

  Albert Sawyer was a slumping wax candle of a man, shrunken and malformed. He had sat up, or had asked to be propped up, against the wall alongside his bed.

  He must have wanted to appear as robust as possible, but repeated cerebral events had robbed Sawyer of muscle control down most of his right side—drooping eye, slack cheek, head tipped over his fallen shoulder. He had also lost too much weight, so that what flesh he’d kept was taut and hollow against his frame, and whereas Cam’s brown face looked abraded or burned, Sawyer’s whiter skin had turned into a blood purple hide, clotted and pebbled. His long bullet head grew hair only in wisps.

  Cam and Maureen had warned them, but Ruth caught her breath and Todd froze in the door, bumping Hernandez with his elbow as he involuntarily reached for his nose.

  She saw their reaction mirrored in the living half of Sawyer’s face. His left eye widened, bright with emotion.

  “Look at these pretty fucks,” Cam said, too loud, in a brash voice she hadn’t heard before. Sawyer’s gaze rolled furiously and Cam spoke again, drawing that one baleful eye to himself.

  “You ever seen anybody this fucking well manicured?”

  Sawyer’s mouth worked. “Swee’ovem vizza.”

  “Real sweet. They were gonna do black tie.”

  It was a gamble, she thought, making their relationship adversarial, but Cam knew Sawyer best and they hadn’t left him much choice, humiliating Sawyer on first sight.