by Jeff Carlson
“I’m sorry,” Ingrid said. “My toe.”
“Let’s see if we can splint it,” he said, yanking at her boot-lace as he looked at Ruth. She was gazing at him, too, with her half-open laptop in her arms. They both turned away.
Why does she keep pushing me? he thought.
There was a third reason to move east. They’d heard fighting. It was a distant sound — the snap of outgoing artillery — but it meant someone was alive. Cam knew there were old refugee camps among the upper reaches of these mountains. Some of those camps were still in use as supply depots. They might have been excellent rendezvous points for American units trying to escape the plague.
Who were they firing at? Their own infected people? The artillery might also be aimed at Grand Lake, trying to clear those peaks of enemy troops, if in fact the Chinese had landed. These mountains and Grand Lake were at least twelve miles apart as the crow flies, but that was well within range of their guns.
It was insane to hike toward a combat zone and the fallout, yet Cam didn’t see any options. If the torn, intermingled bulk of the mushroom clouds was going to drift this far west, hiking a few miles in either direction probably wouldn’t matter. They’d eaten the last bits of their food and water. They needed help. More than that, they needed trained soldiers and volunteers.
Ruth saw the Chinese troops as an opportunity, because she thought they must be carrying some immunity to the mind plague in their blood.
However the new plague operated, Ruth continued to believe its core structure was modeled after the booster tech. There was no reason to think the Chinese hadn’t also developed a new, contagion-specific vaccine as well. How else could they be operating in the plague zone? Were they all wearing containment suits? It seemed unlikely that the Chinese could have stockpiled or manufactured so many suits, and soon enough the mind plague would reach Asia itself.
If Cam’s group could capture or kill an enemy soldier, they might be able to transfer his immunity to themselves as easily as they’d shared the original vaccine.
Was it possible it might even reverse the effects of the plague in people who were already infected? Ruth wouldn’t say, which Cam knew meant no. At least she didn’t think so. It was still worth the chance. If nothing else, they could protect themselves. Then they could begin to hunt out other survivors and protect them, too, creating a small guerrilla force against the Chinese.
Cam frowned as he examined Ingrid’s foot for bruises or swelling. She looked okay — but the four of them weren’t capable of the last-ditch ambush that Ruth envisioned. Maybe me and Bobbi, he thought. The two of us can try it if there’s no one else, but then who’s left to protect Ruth? Ingrid? We need more than one old lady to guard her.
“This vaccine,” he said. “Would it interfere with the old one? What if it eats it up, too? Then we’d be vulnerable to the machine plague again.”
“No,” Ruth said. “They must have reconfigured the heat engine in the new plague and its vaccine. Not a lot. Even reversing its structure as a mirror image would work. Then the different sets of plagues and vaccines wouldn’t even notice each other.”
“Aren’t we going to fill up at some point?” Bobbi asked. “How many kinds of nanotech can anybody have inside them?”
“The vaccines kill everything else, Bobbi.”
Arguing with Ruth was pointless. She had an answer for everything, so Cam turned his attention to Ingrid again. Her toe wasn’t even sprained that he could see. She was just sixty years old. She probably hurt in other places, too — knees, hips, back — but she’d toughed it out until this one pain was too much.
“Bend your toes for me,” he said.
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Any numbness?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s do what we can to keep you moving,” Cam said, taking a knife to his own sock. He cut off most of the material above his ankle, then did his best to seal his pantleg into his boot again. Next, he used the few inches of spare sock to pad the ball of Ingrid’s foot. She didn’t have any extra meat on her at all, and her foot was bony and lean.
His thirst was maddening. It made him weak. They needed fluids, especially Cam, after losing so much blood, but running water might be even more dangerous than the air. Ruth had said that if the mind plague only replicated when it found new hosts, the worst of it might have passed. Everyone else in this region was infected, so the thickest clouds of nanotech should have already floated away by now, leaving only trace amounts in random, invisible traps — and yet the plague was less likely to adhere to the earth or rock or plants than it was to be absorbed by water. Moving water would enfold the nanotech in itself, gathering and concentrating the mind plague, lining the banks of rivers and lakes with it, so they didn’t know what to do except suffer.
“Are you ready?” he asked, not to Ingrid but to Ruth. The words came out harder than he’d intended, but he couldn’t believe she was just sitting there with her computer on her thighs, pecking at the keyboard with two gloved fingers.
“Leave her be,” Ingrid said. “She’s onto something. You know that.”
“Five minutes.”
“I need fifteen,” Ruth said.
Bobbi found a place against a tree with her M4. Cam didn’t sit down himself. He paced away from the three women, dodging through the white trunks and coin-sized yellow leaves of the aspen. There was a low buzzing he couldn’t identify, but he knew better than to let his curiosity get the better of him. Was it beetles? “We need more people if we’re really going to try to hit the Chinese,” he said, circling back toward Ruth. “Let’s go.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Ingrid said.
“There’s something in these trees. Bugs.”
“Lord God, let me think!” Ruth shouted. “Shut up! Just shut up!” She nearly dropped her laptop as she lurched onto her knees. “What is wrong with you? I swear to God, I’m almost done programming this—”
“Move,” Cam said.
“I won‘t!”
“Shh,” Bobbi said. “I hear it, too.”
“Leave me alone!” Ruth said. “We need to know what we’re dealing with even if we steal their vaccine. I’m almost done. Then we can let the computer work through—”
Cam wrenched her to her feet. The pain in his side was bad but his fear went deeper, because he’d finally seen two of the buzzing insects. Yellow jackets. Big, striped yellow jackets. There was no way of knowing how many of the meat-eating insects would swarm from their nests if they smelled him. He could only guess why they were here at all. Yellow jackets, wasps, and bees were believed to be extinct like moths and butterflies. The ants had wiped out everything that relied on hives and cocoons. Flying insects were also vulnerable to the machine plague. They generated too much warmth, absorbing sunlight with their bodies, creating friction with their wings — enough to activate its heat engine. The environment here was cold enough for the yellow jackets to escape disintegration, but something else must have shielded them from the ants.
“Downhill,” Cam said. “Fast as you can.”
The buzzing grew around them. The fluttering leaves concealed the smaller, darker movements of the yellow jackets — but in seconds, there were fifty or more. Then a hundred.
“Ouch!” Bobbi cried, slapping at her neck.
Ruth quit fighting him. She tucked her laptop into her pack and grabbed her M4, swinging both objects like unwieldy fly swatters. Bobbi and Ingrid chopped at the air, too. They drove some of the yellow jackets away. They enraged the rest. Yellow jackets hummed at Cam’s face, swooping and bumping as he led the group at an angle across the hill. They landed on his shoulders and pried at his hood.
“Oh!” Ingrid shouted.
Cam looked back. The older woman must have had one inside her clothing, because she was pounding at her chest. Then she walked into a tree. She almost fell. Ruth turned to help and Cam yelled, “No! Ruth! Let me—”
He saw a snake near her feet. Long and thick, it was creamy b
rown with dark blotches, a bull snake. It reared its head back to strike. Bull snakes weren’t poisonous, but if it drew blood it would make her a more desirable target for the yellow jackets.
Cam jumped forward and kicked, intercepting the bite. Its fangs grazed his pantleg, stabbing the skin beneath as he stomped at it.
“Look out!” Bobbi screamed behind him. Her M4 chattered into the ground. She wasn’t firing at the yellow jackets. There were more snakes in front of Bobbi and Cam sank his good hand into Ruth’s sleeve, pulling at her as she pulled at Ingrid. They staggered away in a chain.
Cam nearly stepped on a writhing nest. Most were shredded and bloody. A dozen more snapped and bit at each other in a frenzy of pain.
They smashed through the underbrush and the aspen. Cam punched at as many branches as he could reach, trying to drive off the insects as Bobbi squeezed off another short burst at nothing that he could see, sweeping the earth. If there were more snakes, Cam didn’t know if the gunfire would excite them or drive them off, but he drew his pistol, too, thinking to reinforce her.
By now, Ingrid was running with more momentum than intent. She collapsed. Ruth dragged her up and Cam fired six times in front of them, hoping the muzzle flashes and gun-smoke might affect the bugs. Bobbi had the same idea and squeezed off the rest of her magazine, strafing the air. Bullets thunked into the trees. Leaves and bark spun overhead.
Somewhere, far away, Cam thought he heard rifle fire crackling in response to their weapons, like Morse code. They kept running. Bobbi reloaded but held her fire exactly as Cam was hoarding his last shots.
They broke out of the yellow aspen into a green meadow. The insects seemed to be gone. Cam didn’t want to stop, but Ruth and Ingrid were staggering and his side felt like it had split open, tearing the stitches.
“Rest,” he gasped. “Rest but get ready to move.”
“I saw fifty of them! Fifty snakes!” Bobbi said. Heaving for air, she tried to climb onto an old log but slipped and half fell. At the same time, Ingrid, Cam, and Ruth stepped gingerly in the brush, facing outward from each other.
“Water,” Ruth said. “There has to be water.”
“We’ll follow that gully,” Cam said. The north side of the meadow dropped away into a pair of ravines. He was sure they’d find a creek eventually… but would anything be safe to drink?
Bobbi wept, removing her mask to knead at the welts on her face and neck. Cam distracted himself by listening for more gunfire. The artillery unit must have heard them. Were they trying to signal Cam’s group or were they losing the on-and-off battle he’d been following for more than an hour? If they’d left their artillery and were fighting with small arms instead, was that because they were retreating from infected people?
There were no more shots, so Cam glanced back into the trees, wondering at what he’d just seen. Bull snakes were not indigenous to this elevation. Neither were yellow jackets. Cam believed they were at nine thousand feet. There shouldn’t be anything here to feed the snakes, who lived mostly on rodents and small lizards. There were no rodents left below the death-line, and not many above it, either — but maybe that was why the bull snakes had migrated this high, finding just enough chipmunks, immature marmots, birds, and eggs to endure all this time. Maybe the snake population was actually descending again after surviving the plague year above ten thousand feet, hibernating through the long winters and leaving only the hardiest, most adaptable individuals to reproduce.
The bull snakes could very well be evolving to eat bugs, too, adapting their diet to the only available food source. Maybe they’d kept the ant colonies from expanding into this area, which was why the yellow jackets had survived up here, too, developing a crude symbiosis with the reptiles.
He had more important questions.
“Would the mind plague affect animals?” he asked into the silence. “Ruth? Hey. Would the new plague affect snakes and yellow jackets?”
“How the hell would I know?”
Cam bristled at her tone, but Ingrid spoke first. “We got out of there,” Ingrid said. “That’s all that matters.”
“It’s not. We need to know if we’re going to have problems with them, too. I mean if they’re contagious.”
Ruth shrugged. She wouldn’t look at him or the other woman. At last, she said, “Animals don’t have the same neurological makeup as humans do. Not even close. My guess is the nanotech would misfire or only partially activate, but how would you know if a snake was acting funny?”
“They could be paralyzed,” Cam said. “Or go blind or have seizures.”
She met his eyes now. “Yes.”
“I didn’t see any snakes that weren’t moving,” Bobbi said, and Ingrid said, “Ruth, do you want to finish whatever you were doing with your laptop? Then we’ll get moving.”
“Yes.”
Cam wouldn’t let it go. “If they’re warm enough, the plague could be breeding in them even if it doesn’t affect the way they act,” he said. “That means we’d better avoid everything. Kill everything.”
None of them spoke. Ingrid worked at her foot. Ruth opened her laptop and Cam glanced over the meadow, watching for yellow jackets.
“Jesus, I’m thirsty,” Bobbi said.
He might have had a hand in saving the insects and snakes. Maybe it was perverse, but the idea made him glad. This world needed every life-form it could find.
Long ago, in Grand Lake, Cam and Allison had participated in a widespread trap-and-release program to share the vaccine with as many animal species as possible. Mostly, they’d succeeded with rats. The elk, marmots, grouse, and birds that were native to this elevation had been hunted to extinction, but the rats thrived in the crowded refugee camps, and, once immunized, the rats did the rest of their work for them.
There were mountaintops where no people had gone. There were others where no one had survived for long. Some animals must have persisted in those lonely peaks. In time, they were attacked by the vaccinated rats. The rats bred uncontrolled beneath ten thousand feet, warring with the insects and invading the new outposts built by men. In the summer, the rats also returned to the mountains, where they took the young of the few remaining marmots and swarmed the old or injured elk. They stole the eggs of the grouse and other birds. But they also passed the vaccine to the animals they attacked but didn’t succeed in killing.
Were the yellow jackets now immune after an encounter with the rats? Cam hoped so. We should come back here if we get the chance, he thought. We should come back and do everything we can to protect them, breed them.
The emotions in him were both lonely and good, because he knew the idea would have made Allison happy. It would have made her feel rich.
Just think what we could do with pollinators again, he thought.
They lost sight of the horizon as they edged into Willow Creek, a high mountain canyon within ten miles of Grand Lake. Cam would have stayed out of this valley altogether if he wasn’t sure the artillery unit was stationed inside it. Even so, he kept his group as far up the box canyon’s north side as possible, traversing east without losing any more elevation than necessary. He didn’t want to have to climb back out if it looked like the gun crews had fled or were infected.
The creek meandered through the canyon floor, running southwest toward the only low point, where eventually it jogged south and fell downslope alongside a small state highway. That road hit Highway 40, which wasn’t so far from Interstate 70, Loveland Pass, and roads leading into the Leadville crater. Cam knew the area well. During the war, his Ranger unit had picked their way cross-country from 40 to 70, skirting the fallout zone. Any number of civilian camps and small military garrisons had filled the region since then.
The first body was below them to the south. The man lay on his back, his face and naked chest much lighter than the rock and brush. Only the white skin drew Cam’s gaze. Then he realized the ground down there was burned and torn, concealing what had been a rutted dirt road.
“Look,” he said.<
br />
Ruth and Ingrid both knelt, merely using the opportunity to rest. Bobbi squinted in the direction he’d pointed. Her eyes must have been better than his. “Jesus,” she said. “How many people do you think are down there? Thirty?”
Once he understood what he was looking for, his eyes registered at least twenty bodies littered in an area as big as a football field. The mind plague must have driven some of the infected to follow the survivors into these mountains… The artillery crews had walked their guns back and forth across the mouth of Willow Creek, dropping everyone who’d chased them. Cam was doubly glad he’d kept them out of the canyon. The battlefield was at least a mile away, but it was surely contagious.
“Bobbi,” he said suddenly. “Fire two shots.”
“What? Why? I’m almost empty.”
He was down to a few rounds himself, but touched his holster. “They’ll have spotters looking for anyone like us who comes over the mountains,” he said. “Then they’ll shell us if they don’t think we’re okay.”
Ruth was already struggling back to her feet. She unslung her carbine while Bobbi stared into the canyon as if looking for FOs, forward observers. Even ragged and dirty and hurt, Ruth processed situations faster than anyone else.
She was a fighter. She was what he needed.
Blam! Blam! Ruth squeezed off two rounds into the air, startling someone above them. There was a clatter of gravel a hundred yards up the slope and Cam whirled, grabbing for his pistol again. That close? he thought. Then he caught a glimpse of a slinking little shape. A chipmunk? Rats? Maybe these mountains really were coming back to life. Maybe there would be more snakes or lizards or even wolves or bees in rare places, helping each other in unexpected pairings. Allison was right, he thought, feeling that lonely goodness again.
Ruth’s shots were still echoing in the canyon when two more answered them. Crack-ack!
“One more,” Cam said. Ruth obeyed. Within a few seconds, the signal was repeated again exactly, and Cam said, “Okay. They’re expecting us.”
