“It’s only on the surface,” he said. “Hurts like stink, but not very serious. I’ll put some medication on it, if you like. To be on the safe side.” He had every intention of doing so anyway.
“It isn’t bleeding any more,” she announced after peering at it for a moment, getting his wound into focus. “It looks pretty clean, too.”‘ Her hot, dry fingers touching his skin made him wish for a thermometer, to determine the heat of her fever, but they had none. They had found only one in the time they had traveled together, and that one had been broken.
“There’s some medicine here,” he said, handing her a tube. “Will you put it on for me?” He waited while she worked the cap, then inexpertly squeezed the white paste over the wound.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she worked. “I don’t seem to be doing this very well.” When she was through she fell back once more, breathing in irregular gulps. The little effort she had made had tired her out. Her eyes were distant and glazed and she did not truly see him when she looked at him. At last she brought him back into her thoughts, a frown of concentration showing between her brows as she stared at him. “Evan,” she said, enunciating with painful precision, “I think I’m really hurt. Really.”
That night she was fairly quiet, her sleep never deep, her dreams anxious, her hot flesh restless. But she did not waken or cry out and by morning her fever seemed to have dropped. Evan rigged a bed for her in the sledge and then started south, the rain beating on them from the west and slowing their progress through the rocky high country. Now the high lakes had taken on the slate color of Tahoe as the clouds returned their contaminants to the earth.
Toward the third evening as they neared Echo Summit, the rain let up, showing a sunset of spectacular colors, the sun shining an improbable green through its golden halo. The volcano to the north of them had been busy while the rain fell. Around them, in the burned-over desolation, Evan could see the crenellations of the crest of the Sierra Nevada, the vertebrae of granite that marked the highest ridge of the range. He knew that there had to be shelter for them somewhere on this imposing, rocky face. He thought desperately, trying to remember what he had seen on the maps at Squaw Valley. Surely he could recall the maps; he had studied them so carefully. As he set up the lean-to again for the night, he forced his mind back, seeking for details that had seemed so unimportant when the maps were in front of him.
“Evan,” Thea spoke in a cracked voice as he settled her in the lean-to. “I’m thirsty, Evan. I’m hot. Something’s wrong.”
He looked down at her ravaged face and wiped the short hair off her forehead. “I know, Thea.” He wanted to hold her, to make her well by wishing, but instead he began the horrible, necessary job of cleaning her wound.
This time, he thought with relief, the infection was no worse. It was also no better. The color was still bad and Thea moaned when the air touched it. As gently as he could, Evan probed it, fearing that the infection might be getting deeper. Thea cried out at this, trying feebly to pull away from him, from the nauseating pain he was giving her.
“No, Thea, no. Let me finish. Let me clean it. You’ll be better then, I promise.”
She quieted somewhat, leaning against the crook of his arm, hut flinching whenever she moved, and wailing thinly as he tied on clean bandages, taken now from their stores of torn sheets they had brought with them from the lookout station. He hoped the healing would start soon. There was no more gauze and now he was almost out of torn sheets.
Her fever rose that night, and the next day he did not try to move her, keeping her warmly wrapped in the lean-to while he bathed her face with their dwindling supply of water.
“What’s that?” she screamed, when, in the morning, the ground began to shake. Evan was awake and on his knees in a moment, looking wildly about as the earth tremor continued. With a sense of foreboding he crawled around the lean-to and looked north. There, rolling against the sky, was another, greater cloud, dark and bright at once, laced with lightning and the plume of clouds lit from below.
Thea was weeping, her jaw set and her hands moving nervously when Evan came back to her. She beat her left hand against the ground, as if trying to make the shaking stop. When she saw him, she tried to beat him off, fighting against the blankets and sleeping bag that engulfed her. She struck out at his face, but the blows were weak, hardly more than pats.
Tenderly he took her hand, speaking in a low, calm voice. “Thea. Thea. It’s me. It’s Evan. It’s Evan, Thea. Evan.”
Slowly her thrashing abated and some degree of recognition returned to her face. “Oh. Evan,” she said. “What was that? Did I dream it? The ground was moving. It moved. It moved. And it rumbled…”
“No. It wasn’t just the ground.” He sought for words, chafing the hand that lay in his. “One of the volcanoes has gone off,” he explained with difficulty. “Perhaps all the way off.”
She tried to keep her attention on what he was saying, watching his lips with a muzzy intensity that hurt him more than the welt on his leg. “That’s bad…I think you said…it was bad.”
“Yes, it’s bad.” He bent to kiss the palm of her hand, and felt the dry heat on his lips. “I’m sorry, Thea. I know it isn’t wise, but we have to move on. It isn’t going to be safe up here, not for a while.”
She made an effort to rise. “I’ll help you pack,” she began, then gasped and fell back. “I can’t…I can’t…why…”
Carefully he hushed her, then set about preparing the sledge to travel once again. Now he was worried about rock slides, and the deeper fear that the cold would be on them again sooner than he thought, and the air would be more harmful than it had been only a few days ago.
When they climbed over the rubble of Echo Summit, Thea was delirious. Between her fever and the garish colors in the air, Evan paid little attention to what was going on around them.
And because if these things, it was quite by accident that two days later, Evan found the road to Lake Kirkwood. It was almost dark, and the faint afterglow shone blue and yellow-green in the west. The road, which he had found earlier that day, had been in poor repair for nearly two decades and now had cracked into uneven chunks, destroyed by the earth tremor. Evan hated it and only took it because not even the sturdiest of the Pirates’ vans could drive on it without mishap. The weight of the sled had become intolerable to him, and he moved drunkenly as he hauled this burden over the ruined road. Lack of sleep and food had taken a fearsome toll of him. He did not think clearly, his eyes sometimes played tricks on him, and his muscles felt as if they were trying to unhook themselves from his tendons and bones.
Then there was another road, just off the side on the right, a badly tarred strip leading down the side of the mountain into a pocket tucked away in the granite front of the Sierra. He stopped walking and looked at it stupidly, his mind hardly working. He knew they had to find protection. Through the cotton batting of exhaustion, he drove that thought home. They had to find protection. There was another road, more broken than the one he had chosen, and he took almost an hour to make up his mind about it. At last he decided that the worst that would happen would he that they would be trapped in the place at the bottom of the road. This no longer worried him, for the concealment it offered was more attractive than the risk of being trapped in the stone basin. With a lurch he dragged the sledge off the crumbling two-lane way, onto the old side road.
The lake was small and L-shaped, having a few vacation cabins on part of it, the wreckage of a campground and boathouse near a collapsed country store. In the blue moonlight, Evan could see that there were a few buildings standing on the far side of the lake, and amazingly, three or four fruit trees with stunted apples still hanging on spindly limbs.
“I want to go home. I want to go home,” Thea kept insisting, her voice like a child’s. “Who cares about spooky old Mr. Thompson’s survival practice anyway? I want to go home.”
Evan turned back to her, feeling helpless, feeling worn out, feeling angry. “All right, The
a,” he croaked, his voice nearly gone from fatigue. “We’re home.”
She looked dazedly around. “Not here. Not here, home. Home. Camminsky Creek. Don’t you know where that is? Mister?” Her face lost expression and there were tears on her cheeks. “I don’t know where it is, either. I can’t it…Help me, mister…I’m lost…” Her words trailed off into sobs.
Irritated, Evan took the first cabin he came to that still had a roof. It was a small A-frame with a sagging floor, and the smell told him several animals had used it before now. But anything was better than standing up on aching hips and knees, being harnessed to the sledge, listening to Thea, soaking from the rain. Leaving the sledge outside he made a quick, sleepy survey of the place, and finding it passably sound, he looked for some light.
In the kitchen he found a few candles and set them up in the three lower rooms for the little light they could give. Chipmunks and other small rodents had destroyed most of the furniture but the stove, for although it was a little rusty, was still sound, and its chimney was intact. He decided the house would do for the night.
Making a last effort, he pulled the sledge inside, then jammed the door closed behind it. He reached for a can and a pot, then stumbled into the kitchen to start a fire. He had to eat. He needed to get something hot into him. Then, once he was dry, he would take care of Thea.
He woke the next morning still seated at the kitchen table, his head by his plate of half-eaten supper. For a moment he thought he was back at Squaw Valley, that the rest had been an unpleasant dream, one born of apprehension and eroding hope. Then he touched his leg and found the sore place where the bullet had creased it.
“Thea.” He said it aloud, getting to his feet and shaking his head to clear the sleep from it. He went to the sink but the taps didn’t work, and no water rushed out. Swearing now, he turned and stumbled into the living room, fear like ice in his vitals. “Thea…”
There was the sledge, where he had left it, and Thea lay in it. Her face was very pale and quiet, framed by the still-damp tendrils of her dark hair touched with white. There was no sign of the pain that had racked her for the last several days. A curious half-smile lit her cracked lips, as if she had a secret all her own. One hand dangled listlessly over the side of the sledge, pale as milk but for the skinned knuckles.
“Dear God; dear fucking God,” Evan whispered. Not noticing the tears that filled his eyes, he flung himself across the room to her side, grasping the pathetic little hand in his, holding it against his wet face, his mouth pressed against it to stop the sounds he made.
The hand was cool against his skin, and it was not for some minutes that he realized it wasn’t stiff, and that she was breathing—shallowly but breathing. Then the slender fingers curled weakly around his beard and her faint voice said, “Evan…Let me…stay…”
Jumbled words of relief choked him. He pulled her to him, his head pressed against her body. He felt the life in her. He did not care when he cried.
Looking up at her he saw for the first time the glory of her smile. Softly she touched his hair, his eyes, with her cool hand. “I do love you, Evan,” she said. As his arms tightened around her, she closed her eyes and slept.
The day after they found a larger, more secure house at the far end of the lake, behind the store, slightly concealed. The plumbing there had been destroyed by the earth tremor, but the building was more sound and better insulated than the A-frame was. It was the best place to live at Lake Kirkwood.
Over her protests, Evan carried Thea down to the new house, saying that she was not fully recovered and he would take no chances with her. He had come too close to losing her and would not risk it again. He ceremoniously installed her in the largest bed she had ever seen and wrapped her in four layers of blankets while she laughed.
“But your leg was hurt,” she reminded him when he was satisfied with the cocoon he had made her. “You were shot, weren’t you? Didn’t you have a wound in your thigh?”
“A scratch,” he said, waving his hand to dismiss it. “You had me so very frightened, Thea.” His voice dropped as he spoke.
“But I made it. I’m still alive. Don’t underestimate me, Evan.” She pulled the covers back from her shoulder and watched him as he moved around the room, pointing out its wonders. “And,” he added when he had finished describing the closets and the chest of drawers, “there is an added bonus: three trunks with clothes, mostly for winter. We’re in luck.”
“What about food? Are we in luck there, too?” She knew that they had been on short rations for the whole time since her fever had broken, and the chill in the air told her that they would not have a chance to grow a crop of vegetables before winter; the volcano had stolen the summer from them.
“I’ve looked in the store, of course,” he began evasively. “And there’s a few things in the houses. Canned goods, mostly, beans and rice in sealed cannisters, and some dried fruits.”
“But,” she said, looking at him seriously.
He considered her for a moment, uncertain what to tell her, trying to judge how much she had recovered and what she could bear to know.
She saw this and said, “I am not a child, Evan. If there is trouble, I have a right to know.”
He nodded. “All right: there’s trouble. We’ve lost most of the stores we had. Don’t ask me how. It happened, and that’s all that matters. There are some things we can eat here, hut not very much; maybe two months’ worth of food. Not enough to get us through the winter.”
“I think the winter will be long,” she said as she regarded him with her steady dark eyes.
“Probably,” he admitted. “We can trap, and we still have our crossbows, so we can hunt. I’ve found a couple guns here, and we can make more crossbows if we need to. I’ll try hunting in a couple of days, when you’re better.”
“You mean that we can hunt but there might not be anything to kill?” She twisted in the bed to watch him more closely
“Yes. That’s what I mean—you wanted to know.”
There was silence in the room, then she asked, “Do you think we can grow anything? Can we make a greenhouse or something? There’s wood and glass, so maybe we can.”
“We can try. If not now, in the spring.” There was a false note of optimism to these words, and he looked out the window as he spoke, seeing the rocks and cold that made a lie of his assurances.
She nodded. “I see. Well, I’ll do what I can.” She did not speak of the anxiety that preyed on her, a worry that grew deeper each day as her wounded shoulder healed—healed without strength, without sensation returning to her right hand.
The first snow came early, scarcely a flurry on the mid- October wind. It tapped at the mountains and clung to the hollows for a day and then was gone. But it left certainty and fear behind. In its wake would come winter, a winter colored by the fires of a volcano and the deadly rain that was steadily killing off the scrub that had grown where the first had burned away, Each day that it rained the brush shriveled, dried up, and the few animals living where the brush had died, died with it.
Evan had found some seeds, long past their season dates on their packages, but Thea had taken them with good spirit, sticking with winter crops of brussels sprouts, onions, cabbages, and cauliflower. She had marked out the plots and with untutored hands set the seeds, surrounding the area with wide glass panes that would shelter and warm the seedlings. She tended this unpromising garden zealously and was rewarded with the most spindly of sprouts that poked unwillingly from the earth long enough to raise her hopes, then reddened, twisted, and wilted.
“Maybe they’re too old,” Evan said by way of consolation as he worked on stout wooden barricades at the entrance to the little valley. “They were dated for the nineties, and that’s more than fifteen years ago.”
“But they’re all we have,” she objected. “I think I’d better dig up the ground again, and see if I can make a better greenhouse.”
“If that’s what you want, there’re other envelopes. May
be you’re right and some of the plants will grow.” By tacit agreement he did not ask about her hand. He knew how wretched she felt about her continued weakness and three numb fingers.
“I’ve got to try, Evan. I’ll make a real greenhouse, and then we’ll see.”
“Fine.” As he said it, he planned how to cut down their food once again.
When the next snow came, it stayed longer, frosting the mountains and chilling the lake. Now the nights were sharp with ice and packs of starving dogs howled in the dying forests. There were no sounds of engines on the roads, and no signs of tire tracks.
Although the fruit was bitter, Evan and Thea ate all the hard, tiny apples that grew on the trees, relishing them as rare and sweet until at last they were gone. After that their hunger was worse. Their stores dwindles down to rice and a small trove of Japanese noodle soups that they found in the broom closet of the store. Lake Kirkwood had little to offer them: here there was no miner’s lettuce, no watercress, no berries trailing their sharp vines through the underbrush, no wild currants, no grapes. If there had been fish in the lake, there were none now and the cold grew deeper every day.
One night, soon after the third snowfall, Thea turned to Evan as he lay beside her, half asleep. “Evan?”
“Um?”
“What will happen to us here? Won’t we starve? What if we go south? Can’t we get out of the mountains onto the desert? If it’s this cold here, we might be able to get by on the desert. We could raise things if it were warmer. You said yourself that it’s getting colder.”
“We might go south,” he agreed languidly, fingering her breast scar, which had recently turned a tawny color like his regenerated arm. He gave her a bemused smile. “It’s catching, whatever it is.”
“I know. My father thought the defective kids and the regeneration were all part of the same thing, all tied together somehow. He thought it might be a virus that changed.” She returned to her first question. “Evan, why don’t we go there? What’s wrong with the desert?”
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