by Steven Gould
They managed to pull several chunks of heavy glass from a bank, useless for window glazing because of its thickness, but almost as good as Jemez obsidian for flaking into cutting edges.
The second day, pushing aside some cinder block, Kimble uncovered a home security system. There was metal. But worse, an old sealed lead-acid battery shorted as he shifted the material above. The sudden surge in EMF was almost as bad as stomping a bug. He threw himself sideways, rolling across shards of glass and stucco and scrambled away as the sudden buzzing of descending bugs rose to a shriek.
He got down the bank without any bug burns but he was bleeding from several cuts.
Julio, walking back from taking a load of glass down to the bank, saw the incident from a safe distance. “Wow. You moved before I saw anything.”
“Heard ’em,” said Kimble.
Julio looked puzzled.
“That high-pitched sound they make. Like, oh, super high crickets.”
“Huh. I don’t hear that. I hear the buzzing when they fly.”
Kimble shrugged.
Julio helped him clean out the cuts. “Young ears, I guess. You never used an MP3 player, I bet.”
They had to abandon a small pile of their salvaged glass panes near that house.
Water flowed over the top of the Alameda dam and fell six feet straight down so they spent most of the next morning portaging glass around the dam. It would’ve taken half an hour if they could’ve stuck to the shoreline, but the bugs were there in droves and they had to go inland a bit to find a safe path.
This time of year, the water’s source was snowmelt and it felt like it, but after hauling the raft and glass around, Kimble let himself fall full length into the shallows.
“We had good luck near Montaño, last time,” said Julio.
The bridge at Montaño had not become a dam. The main span had fallen one section at a time and the first section had sunk deep into a sandy area of the riverbed, leaving most of it above water. This had allowed the bugs to eat it to rubble and floods had pushed the chunks downriver. The water rushed through the gap and down a set of rapids. They had no choice but to run it. Bugs heavily infested both banks along the old thoroughfare, so portaging the glass around was more dangerous than the river.
Though the run down the rapids took less than ten minutes, they spent half the day packing the glass between layers of dried reeds and lashing them securely to the middle of the raft. They caromed off rocks twice and Kimble stopped worrying about the glass and instead worried about the raft itself, but despite the shaking, they reached the still water below the rapids with both glass and craft intact.
The houses closest to the river in this part of the city had been large, with correspondingly large lots. The yards, once xeriscaped or green with grass, were now brush and weeds and young woods, fortunately threaded with game trails.
“The deer came back with a vengeance, and the coyotes, and the rabbits,” said Julio. He set some snares in the rabbit runs. “But you really have to watch out for the dogs.” Which is why they both carried spears.
They hit the jackpot working a street farther from the river than Julio had reached on his previous trip.
“Looks like it was a solarium.”
On the south side of a large adobe house—almost a mansion—an exterior wall had been filled, ceiling to floor, with double-glazed windows, admitting light. The panes, two feet by three, had been set directly in the adobe. When the metal roof had been eaten, the rains had turned the exposed wall to mud, sloughing and sagging gently over the years. The glass had settled with the wall and was embedded now in loose dirt and rotting straw, overgrown with bindweed and goat-heads.
It took them less than half a day to pull more intact panes than they could carry on the raft and, though they once had to drive off a pack of feral dogs by throwing rocks, the worst thing they had to contend with was the quarter-inch barbs of the puncture vine.
“I hate goat-heads!” Kimble repeated for the twentieth time.
Julio nodded in agreement.
They abandoned some of their previously salvaged glass in favor of the consistently sized panes from the solarium. When the cargo had been padded and packed, the water, previously a good six inches below the deck now lapped at the wood.
That night they ate rabbit on a sandbar near the old Rio Grande Nature Center. The weather had warmed and the mosquitoes were bad but they burned half-dried cattails and the smoke kept the gnats and mosquitoes away.
The next day they spent two hours getting the raft over the dam formed by the old Interstate Bridge. The water flowed over a large section and the problem wasn’t rapids but water that was too shallow. They pulled and lifted and dragged until they made it down.
“And that should be that,” said Julio. “The bridge at Cesar Chavez washed out completely, there’s a nice gap at Rio Bravo and the highway bridge where 25 crossed back over. We might have to drag the raft over some shallows but there’ll be no more rapids before the Puerco.”
They were in the old South Valley when they heard the hail from the east shore. A shirtless man with sunburned face and shoulders stood in the tall grass. His pants were khaki with a small stripe down the side in brown.
Uniform? He thought he’d seen pants like that before.
“Can you give me a ride? Bugs cut us off.”
On these lazy stretches they let the river do the work, using a pole to push the raft this way or that. Julio was slipping it into the water when Kimble said, “Wait. What does he mean, ‘us’?”
Julio raised his eyebrows but he didn’t push the raft any closer to shore. “How many of you are there?” he called out. “We’re pretty low in the water.”
The man crouched. “It’s just two of us,” he said. He let one hand reach down to something in the grass.
“We couldn’t take two.” He gestured at the driftwood caught among the salt cedars. “You could lash together a raft pretty quick, though. Couple of hours.”
Another man stepped out from behind those very same salt cedars, a multi-barrel rifle dangling from one hand.
Kimble slammed his shoulder into Julio and they both tumbled off the raft into the icy water. It was mid-channel and the water was over their heads. Julio came up sputtering. “What the hell!” He grabbed the edge of the raft and started to pull himself out but Kimble grabbed his shoulders from behind.
“No! That’s Pritts! He murdered two deputies back in Parsons breaking jail. He’ll shoot you as soon as look at you.” As if on cue, a ceramic slug slammed into the edge of the deck and shattered, sending fragments and splinters flying. The raft, jostled by their abrupt departure, was spinning in the current and they had rotated around to where it no longer shielded them.
Kimble saw the bare-chested man, now standing, another multi-barrel rifle in his hand. Pritts was pointing his rifle at the raft. If they’d all been loaded, he had three more barrels to fire. “Put into shore or the next one goes into your head!” he yelled across the water.
Kimble kicked sideways, turning the raft. Another shot hit the deck and they heard glass break. Julio, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, got the idea and they quickly positioned the raft and cargo between them and the men.
They were a good hundred feet out from Pritts and now directly abreast of their position. Kimble started kicking the raft farther away but Julio said, “Kick downstream. We go any farther toward the other bank and we’ll be in the shallows again, where the current slows.”
The current was moving as fast as a man could run and Kimble, peeking, saw Pritts and his companion doing just that, trying to keep up with them, but then they stopped, swearing, as a large cloud of bugs rose up around them. Kimble hadn’t heard them step on one, but the two fugitives dropped their guns and dove sideways into the shallows.
The river curved away and the bend soon blocked their view of the shrinking figures. Chilled, Kimble pulled himself aboard and then helped Julio up over the edge.
“You’ve got a
splinter in your forehead,” Kimble said. They had an extra pole but the one Julio had dropped when Kimble pushed him into the water had floated down with them. They recovered it and then Kimble pulled the splinter out of Julio’s scalp and staunched the bleeding. “Looks intact,” he said, examining the splinter.
“How did you know about them? That guy?” Julio asked as Kimble bandaged his head.
“Pritts? Saw him once when I was working with a peddler over in Parsons. He was chief deputy. He ran a meth ring with the other deputies. Surely you heard about it?” There, all true, without saying anything about the Rangers or Captain Bentham.
“Oh. Yeah. Heard about that. Not sure I heard the name. Hadn’t heard about the jailbreak.”
“You should look at the posters at Martha’s store more often.” Another truth. Kimble grabbed the pole and started pushing the raft over toward the eastern shore.
“What are you doing?” Julio looked back upstream, as if expecting the two fugitives to show up any second.
“You all right? I mean, your head and all?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I’m going to keep tabs on them. You go on and meet Patrice, unload the glass, but then float on down to the Ranger Station near Isleta Pueblo. That’d be the quickest. Okay?”
“How am I supposed to get home from Isleta Pueblo?”
“Have Patrice come get you by road—without the glass. Go back for the glass after.”
Julio was inclined to argue. “Ruth will kill me if I let you go back there. She thought this trip was dangerous enough with just the bugs.”
The raft grounded in the shallows, out of the current, and Kimble grabbed his bedroll, backpack, and the food bag. “Patrice has more supplies, so I’m taking this.”
“You can’t go,” Julio said sternly.
“It’s okay, really.”
“I mean it!” said Julio and reached out to take Kimble’s arm.
Kimble put him down on the deck relatively gently, Julio’s wrist locked painfully at ninety degrees to his arm. Julio tried to get up and quickly found the futility of that. “Sorry,” Kimble said. Still holding the nikkyo grip, he stepped off the raft into the shallows, pushed Julio away to flop onto his back and, before Julio could get back up, shoved the raft out into the current.
Before Julio was standing, Kimble had vanished into the bosque.
12
Rapid Responses
Kimble’s first thought was to head for higher ground, but the South Valley was named that for a reason, broad and flat. The old earthen levee was the highest ground and it had eroded badly over the years. He settled for a large cottonwood tree growing in one of the old irrigation ditches and used a strap from his backpack to shinny up the trunk to its lowest branch, fifteen feet off the ground.
He couldn’t see them, but there was smoke from a fire drifting up near the river in or beyond a clump of Russian olive trees. Examining the ground between his tree and the fire, he saw lots of bugs. From the debris scattered around he realized this area had been junkyards, old auto salvage yards and light industrial.
He could always wade upriver, but he thought Pritts and his friend would be watching, looking for more river traffic. He headed due east, instead, threading up a dirt alley. After a while, he hit an old high-tension electrical right-of-way. The wires and their metal towers had been the first things to go, back when the bugs first showed up. Just as the shorted battery had called them up in Corrales, the high voltage EMF had drawn them from all corners.
Scraps of insulation wound through the weeds and coiled across the ground like shed snakeskins, but the metal had long ago walked or flown away in the bodies of robot bugs.
Kimble followed the path carefully, slowly. Watching out for bugs and for Pritts required two different observation behaviors. Failing at either would have disastrous consequences.
Sensei is going to kill me, he thought. Or Captain Bentham will. For some reason this cheered him up a little. They can’t both kill me, after all.
He came to a spot where flooding had strewn debris from a sheet metal shop across the electrical right-of-way. The bugs weren’t solid across the ground but they covered most of it. He rested in the shade for fifteen minutes then picked his way carefully through the stretch of feeding bugs. He was halfway across when he smelled ozone and something moved in the adjacent auto salvage yard.
Something big.
He froze and crouched. Did I walk right up on them? By his estimate, he was till several hundred yards away from the campfire smoke. He took two quick, stretching steps over patches of bugs until he came to a stand of head-high cedar brush that shielded him from whoever was moving in the next field. The base of the bushes was clear of bugs. He leaned forward and parted the cedar branches slowly, trying to see through, but it was too thick. All he succeeded in revealing was a hollow three feet off the ground formed by several branches. Loose feathers and broken eggshells showed that a chicken had nested there in the past. He stepped up into the hollow, sat on his rucksack, and leaned forward again, moving a branch down on the far side.
The thing moving in the yard was not human. It looked like a longhorn steer, including long horns and a swinging tail, but it was not a steer. It was oily black and the ears were perfectly circular. Below the horns there were no eyes, just patches of darker black. And the horns … well, the horns looked like lightly oxidized aluminum.
It was walking in a circle, head down, swinging its horns from side to side. If Kimble had seen an actual longhorn walking like that, he would’ve suspected a serious illness or perhaps jimsonweed (of which the Dineh say, “Eat a little, and go to sleep. Eat some more, and have a dream. Eat some more, and don’t wake up.”).
This not-steer’s movement, though odd, seemed filled with purpose. The circle was getting smaller and smaller as the not-steer spiraled in. Finally it began slight movements forward and backward, little half steps. It stopped. In fact it froze, motionless for a few moments, then it took four precise steps forward and its tail lifted.
You’re shittin’ me!
The cow pie looked like many others, except for its color—black. The mixture of solid and liquid was just right, and in the twilight Kimble would’ve passed right by it without a second thought.
Well, he would have if it had stayed still.
At first Kimble thought it was shrinking, but after a moment he realized it was burrowing, instead, sinking into the earth. There was a haze around it as if vapors were being given off but it soon dropped completely below the surface. The steer—the not-steer, that is—turned in place until its head was back over the hole, for now it was definitely a hole. From his perch in the cedar, Kimble thought the opening was at least ten inches across. He could see eight inches down the opposite wall before the near edge cut it off and there were still steamlike vapors rising out of the opening.
The not-steer lowered its nose until it was a foot above the hole and froze. The silvery horns, at first nearly touching the ground, rotated upward until they pointed straight at the sky.
Kimble rolled out of the tree without thinking, landing back in the clear space at the cedar’s base. Then he heard the buzzing that followed the near ultrasonic sound of swarming bugs. Bugs had lifted into the air all around him, not unlike a swarm. Their passage through the air was not as urgent, but they were all headed his way.
He sunk down, hugging the ground as the bugs buzzed overhead, several bouncing through the cedar brush.
The old electrical right-of-way was temporarily empty and Kimble crawled sideways until he could see past the cedar. Like a miniature tornado, the bugs formed a descending funnel hanging down from the drifting cloud above, drawing tighter and tighter as they streamed down into the hole created by the not-steer.
That must be some deep hole.
A low-flying bug cut through a cedar branch, which dropped to the ground in front of him. Kimble scrambled north up the right-of-way. When he looked back over his shoulder, the not-steer had turned and
was watching him.
* * *
HIS light shorts and shirt had dried by the time he passed the not-steer, but when Kimble came up on their campsite, he could tell that Pritts and his buddy were still cold, if not also wet. The fire Kimble had been using to spot their camp was a bonfire now, as they’d gotten some of the drift logs alight. Both men stood close to the flames, rotating slowly.
It was getting late and Kimble didn’t want to step on a bug in the night. He found a hollow under some brush cedar overlooking the camp, and he edged in, inspecting carefully for bugs. He was shielded from view on all sides, though he could move a branch if he wanted to see them. He was close enough that an occasional word or phrase drifted over the distance, but most of what the men said was being drowned out by the snap and roar of the fire.
While there was still light, he dressed in warmer clothes, laid his bedroll out, and put his other things where he could reach them easily.
As the bonfire died down he could hear more of what the men said.
“If I have to go into the water one more time to avoid bugs, I’m just gonna let them eat me.” It was the other deputy, the one who wasn’t Pritts.
“We don’t find some food, soon,” said Pritts, “I’ll eat you.”
“Bet those two on the raft had some food.”
“Yeah, well, we won’t know now you scared ’em off, Ortiz.”
“I scared them off? They didn’t jump into the river until you showed your rifle.”
“They were already leery. The older guy started asking questions before that. You were too eager.”
“Sure I was.”
The give and take sounded routine, almost like an old married couple. Pritts got up and threw a long branch of green cedar on the fire that went up with a bunch of crackling and popping, drowning out the next phase of their argument. Kimble just caught fragments.
The month before, they’d ridden in from the west, crossing over the lava of the Three Sisters, threading down through the Petroglyph National Monument. They’d lost Pritts’ horse on the edge of Paseo de Volcan, when it had punched a leg down into the earth, probably where an old pipeline had been eaten down its length, leaving the earth above unsupported. Ortiz’s horse they’d killed in the city, to eat.
