by Steven Gould
Kimble stared off into the dark. Thirty thousand? All dead? He had a hard time imagining that many people in the entire world. He rubbed his fingers together, remembering the slippery blood. Thirty thousand riddled with bug holes.
“Yes, Sensei.”
3
Bugs Don’t Like Water
It took four days to reach the village of Perro Frio on a bend of the Rio Puerco. There was a more direct route, but bugs still worked the rusty remains of refineries, pre-bug communities, and railroad trestles, and Ruth and Kimble took the safe road, swinging wide. They arrived midday on Thursday, market day, when the population of the village increased fourfold. Though they had been taking turns pulling the travois, Kimble insisted on pulling it as they entered the village.
She bought fresh tomatoes and onions from one of the farmers using coin left over from the foiled thief.
“Passing through?” the man asked.
“No. I’ve come to homestead,” explained Ruth.
“Near here?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve already registered it? Then you must’ve taken one of those plots up on the east mesa. Mighty dry.”
“Uh, no. It’s on the river.”
The farmer and his wife exchanged glances. “Everything near water is already being worked. Until you get about twenty miles downriver.”
“According to the map, it’s only a mile south of here.”
“Oh, no, dear,” said the farmer’s wife. “Is it in the bend?”
Ruth took out her map and looked at it. “Yes. Did the registrar get it wrong? They said that land was unclaimed and took my fees. Is someone living there?”
“Bugs, dear. Lots of bugs.”
Ruth’s face froze. “Really? The clerk said it was unused. No building, no installations, no pipelines.”
“They used to dump stuff there, before. Old cars and refrigerators and washing machines. Not legally. And it got worse when the bugs first came. People who stayed, trying to clear their land of metal, they dragged more stuff over there.”
Ruth’s face was still frozen as they left the market. Kimble said, “We should go look.”
She turned to him. “Bugs are dangerous. Remember the men from Oklahoma?”
“So is water, Sensei. We still drink it. We’ve walked four days. You walked six weeks. What’s twenty more minutes?”
She looked at him and took a deep breath, then let it out. “Very well.”
* * *
THEY followed the old county road, now a mass of cracked and crumbling asphalt with stretches of sandy washes cutting across where there used to be metal culverts under the pavement. The worst of these had been filled with rock and packed down, as had the worst of the potholes. When they reached the section where the road bordered the homestead site, a former culvert, not filled-in, cut across the road, well washed out. Someone had painted on the old asphalt, DANGER: BUGS, and an arrow labeled DETOUR pointed to a new trail, mostly wagon ruts cutting through the brown grass, that swung wide to the east.
Ruth exchanged glances with Kimble. “Okay. Let’s go see how bad this is.”
Together they wrestled the travois down into the cut and then back up onto the asphalt on the other side.
There were bugs. They saw them almost immediately, mostly on the right—the western side of the road. The non-metallic detritus of appliances and old cars littered the ground. Here the plastic skirts of an automobile wheel well, here the plastic fins of a dryer tumbler, but there wasn’t much actual metal left above ground. The bugs were digging, working chunks below the surface or simply sitting still in the sunlight, their silicon blue photovoltaic wings fully deployed, tracking the sun as it moved across the sky.
Kimble pointed past them. “I’m not really seeing many deeper in. It’s like they dumped the stuff near the road.”
“There’s some,” said Ruth, pointing. After a moment, though, she added, “Not as many as I would’ve expected.”
They followed the old road down the entire property line, until they met the river, bending back. Here was another washed-out culvert and here the dirt-rut detour returned to the county road. Ruth said, “Let’s take a look-see from the river side.” They lowered the travois into the wash and carefully moved toward the river bluff, but there weren’t any bugs in the wash itself. Those landing there by chance would be washed into the river and, unless substantial metal was uncovered, they wouldn’t be drawn there purposefully.
The wash cut down to a layer of volcanic tuff as it neared the river and when they reached the edge there was a drop of about fifteen feet to the bosque.
Back before the bugs, the river had been drained for irrigation projects, taking it down to a mere stream most days, but the bugs had wreaked havoc on metal pipes and pumps and gate gears and reinforced concrete. There were still ditch projects that used the water, but nowhere near as much of the river’s volume was diverted and, as a result, the Puerco flowed steadily most days and flooded on others, making the bosque below verdant.
There were a few bugs in the bosque but not as many as they’d seen near the old road. Cautiously, Ruth climbed up the side of the wash to the bluff top, well away from the road. “Huh.” She stood.
“Can I come up?”
She crouched and extended her arm, then hauled Kimble up.
Once you got some fifty feet from the road, there was only one serious cluster of bugs intruding into the property, where an old path or driveway had let people dump their junk out of sight, but it was in the northern third of the land. As they cautiously walked back and forth, the area between the old road and the bluff’s edge was clear of bugs.
Kimble and Ruth carefully approached the active cluster of bugs set in another shallow wash lined with vivid green grass and brush. “Looks like an old tractor, maybe.”
Most of it was underground, so Kimble asked, “Why do you say that?”
She pointed at large chunks of black rubber. “Those were the tire lugs, for pushing the wheels through loose dirt. You don’t see lugs that big on trucks or cars.”
“If you say so.” Kimble had been outside once, visiting relatives while his mother was still alive, but his memories of the trip had mostly been movies and cartoons played on a cousin’s HD. Cars had also made an impression but the tires on them had been smooth.
“You’d think the tractor would be gone by now,” Ruth said.
Bugs reproduced by binary fission, growing additional selves as they ate. One bug was two in three weeks, four in six, eight in nine, and so on. A year would see one bug become two hundred and sixty thousand if they could find the metal for unchecked growth, and it had been fifteen years since the bugs had appeared.
“Look,” said Kimble. “There’s water in the wash.” He pointed at a trickle of water along the lower edge.
Bugs hated water. You could survive a swarm if you got into water fast enough.
“So there is. I didn’t see any water running under the road, did you?”
Kimble frowned for a second. “Or through any of the cuts. No.”
“If that ground is soaking wet, it would slow them down, wouldn’t it?”
“It might,” agreed Kimble.
They walked into the shallow wash closer to the bluff, where there were no bugs. Ruth dropped to her knees and dug her hand into the sand. The top four inches was dry, the next four inches was damp, and below that water seeped into the hole.
“That’s a lot of water, for here, this high above the river.”
They walked the perimeter again. The water didn’t flow over the homestead boundaries but came out of a rock formation about fifty feet from the road. It flowed five feet down the limestone face and then into the shallow wash, which, without discussing it, they started calling the “wet” wash.
They made a fire back by the bluff and put water in the ceramic pot for tea.
“It would be easy to clear out the junk by the road,” Ruth said as they waited for the water to boil. “The best thing woul
d be to snag it with a rope and drag it out of the dirt and up onto the asphalt where the bugs can eat it proper.”
“A very long rope,” said Kimble.
“Why long?”
“You could catch a bug between something hard and the metal—accidentally pop it.”
Ruth exhaled. “And they’d swarm, right?” She swallowed and Kimble knew she was remembering that moment on the road again.
Kimble pulled up his right sleeve and showed her three scars striping his upper arm. “It’s not always fatal. But I wasn’t that close.”
“Okay. A very long rope,” she conceded. “But what about the tractor? From the number of bugs there seems to be a lot more metal there. Maybe the engine block is sunk into the wash or the chassis or axles.”
“Or all of those,” agreed Kimble.
“There could even be a disc-harrow or a plow behind. I doubt we can pull it up with rope. I mean, not without a team of horses or oxen. If it weren’t in the wash, we might try burying it, until it had enough dirt over it the bugs stopped sensing it. Maybe if we diverted the stream to keep the water away, we could bury it then without having it wash away.”
“I don’t think you need to keep water away from it,” said Kimble. “Just the opposite.”
Ruth looked at him with her head cocked to one side.
“What we need, Sensei, is a dam.”
* * *
ONE of the reasons the wash was so shallow was because the same layer of volcanic tuff that floored the southern dry wash tilted up at an angle across the property. When they’d dug two feet down, twenty feet downstream from the tractor, they hit the rock layer.
“Good,” said Ruth. “We’ll have a solid base.”
Her first inclination had been to buy some cement in the village. But Kimble, doing their laundry in the river, turned up deep red clay in the bank and, while it resulted in a badly stained shirt, it saved them the cost of the cement. They used the travois to drag damp clay from the bank to the foot of the bluff where they lifted it up the cliff by rope a bucket at a time.
They trenched down to the bedrock and made the dam, bowed upstream, out of large rocks set in the clay. Though they’d left the stream edge of the wash unobstructed while building the remaining part, the subsurface water, now obstructed, increased the surface water from a slow trickle to a gushing flow. The sand was wet everywhere in the wash and puddles were forming in the low bits.
The bugs, almost as if irritated, lifted off frequently into the air, buzzing on their crystalline wings, as the water touched their six, eight, ten or, if it was right before budding off, twelve legs. They flew farther and farther from the buried tractor as the water crept higher, and more than once Ruth and Kimble had to retreat down the wash to avoid them.
Ruth and Kimble prepped carefully for the final bit of work. The dam or “Damn dam” as Kimble called it, was three feet high, a full two feet higher than the spot where the tractor block emerged from the wet sand. They had a stack of large rocks and a pile of clay set on the bank, and hollow reeds stuck in their belts in case they needed to retreat under the water.
“Ready?”
“Yes, Sensei.”
They stuck clay on the rocks before shoving them down into the gap, knowing that a large portion of it would be washed away, but they pushed more handfuls of clay into the gaps as they built. The water stopped dead and then perceptibly began to rise. They built above it, overbuilding, really, putting a thick layer of clay on the upstream side and then sticking a woven grass mat onto that, to reinforce it.
As the water rose, the buzzing from flying bugs increased, neared. The bugs were zooming back and forth, the midpoint of their flight always centering on the remains of the tractor, but, as the water rose higher, the extent of their flight increased. Twice Kimble ducked down into the water and once he flicked a bug out of Ruth’s hair.
They smeared the last of the mud over the grass mat and hurried down the wash, then south along the bluff’s edge. The bug activity was so great that even at their campsite, near the southern border of the homestead, the bugs buzzed angrily through the brush, clipping off leaves and branches.
“Fishing,” said Ruth, and pulled out her package of Kevlar fishing hooks and nylon line. They moved down to the bosque and cut willow branches for poles and dug grubs. When they returned with their brown trout, the water was flowing over the lowest part of the dam and the tractor site was under two feet of water. Though a few bugs had settled to the ground on the banks of the new pond, the majority had settled back by the road, where there was still metal left to work.
* * *
THERE was no dojo by the first snowfall, but Ruth and Kimble had achieved a thick-walled, rammed-earth, adobe-plastered cottage, with three rooms and a bucket toilet in its own well-vented closet. A plastic water barrel perched on the live grass roof and a clay-lined, vertical-feed woodstove was built into the north wall. Its clay flue ran horizontally through the rammed earth before venting up and out, using the mass of the wall to store and release heat through the day.
They did practice, though, twice a day, over by the spring on a spot of grass where the dojo would eventually be. It was Kimble’s responsibility to keep it watered and to find every sharp stick, hard rock, and goat-head sticker in the area. Most of these he found by looking and that was far better than the ones he discovered with his back, his knees, or his feet. He found out early, though, that if he pulled a rock from the earth, it was far better to replace it with well packed dirt, than to leave the hole to catch his feet.
And he pulled so many goat-heads that he found himself spotting the tiny yellow flowers of the puncture vine in his dreams.
A great deal of Ruth’s luggage had been freeze-dried foods, though she had a small set of territory-safe tools. She also had a great deal of cash, now stored in a hidden wall hollow of the new cottage. “Divorce—we split the dojo, we split the house.” She shrugged. “There’s much more in the bank, but the nearest branch is Nuevo Santa Fe.”
She bought vegetables and eggs at the market. Cash was hard to come by so she was always welcome. Most locals had to barter with each other. She was one of a small group of customers who, in the dead of winter, bought fresh greens from Covas, a farmer with a greenhouse. One day in March, Kimble and Ruth had just turned away from Covas’ market stall when Sandy Williams staggered into their path and stopped. “Business must be good. What are your rates?”
Williams was a giant of a man with a full-beard and long, greasy hair that hung down his sheepskin coat in a thick braid.
Kimble had heard he was a spectacularly bad farmer whose wife had left him in the late fall. “He didn’t get one single crop in,” Masey Garcia, daughter of the district agricultural agent, told Kimble the month before. “He had some good tomatoes but he borrowed money on the strength of the crop and then drank it away when he should’ve been pickin’ and dryin’ them. Most rotted on the vine and that hailstorm in mid-September did for the rest.”
Ruth frowned at Williams. “Excuse me? What do you mean?”
“Fine-lookin’ woman like you, kept her figure, always has cash. I wonder how much you charge.”
Kimble didn’t understand but he saw Ruth blush and her jaw set. “Let’s be very clear about what you are implying. Are you saying I’m a prostitute?”
Williams took a step forward and Kimble smelled alcohol on his breath. “That’s sure a fancy way of sayin’ it. I’d of said, ‘whore.’” He leered at her. “With that cute tush of yours, I see why you’re rakin’ in the cash.” Williams jerked his thumb at Kimble. “And I see you’re a full-service establishment—sodomites, too?”
As his voice rose, conversations in the marketplace died and people froze, watching, mid-transaction, like some painted tableau: Loudmouth in the market.
Kimble’s eyes narrowed and his stomach hurt. This was a little too familiar. He was shifting his weight, getting ready to move when Ruth shoved the shopping basket into his hands.
She
drew herself up very straight, very still. “You have ten seconds to apologize,” she said. Her voice, slightly raised, carried easily across the now quiet market.
Williams laughed. “Or what?” He gestured around. “There ain’t a man around here that can take me, nor any group of th—”
Her slap turned his head around and he took a short step back to gain his balance.
“You little whore!” Williams drew one fist back and reached forward with the other, as if to clutch Ruth’s jacket, but Ruth wasn’t there.
He felt a hand take his collar from behind and another push down into the crook of his elbow, then he was spinning around and on his knees, facing the other direction, the hand on the collar shoving him down into the dirt. A voice whispered near his ear, “You should’ve apologized.” With a roar, he surged back to his feet, shoving upward, but he encountered no resistance, just a smooth pull backward on his braided hair, and then an arm swept upward lifting his chin and arcing his body farther back. There was a twist, and his entire lower body was neatly blocked out as he flew backward. He landed on the back of his head and shoulders in the packed dirt of the marketplace, his arms and legs folded awkwardly over, like a child’s botched backward somersault.
Kimble felt the impact through the ground.
Williams fell sideways and thrashed his way onto all fours. He was shouting short forceful obscenities with great feeling. He jerked his way to his feet and staggered sideways into Covas’ stall, knocking bushels of lettuce over. He clutched at the side of the stall for balance, as the obscenities continued like a fountain, becoming more complex and inventive as he regained his footing.
“You whoring bitch!” was the last and politest thing he said before he launched himself at Ruth, arms outstretched, trying to take her down by momentum alone.
Ruth feinted toward his face and dropped to her hands and knees, pivoting her hip into his knees. As he flew over her he got his hands out in front of him, but his face still smashed into the ground. When he rolled over, his nose was flowing like a bloody brook.
