by Jeff Carlson
Gradually she realized it was over. She looked for Cam and saw his face bent with his own agony. He lay on his side, picking dirt out of the cut on his bad hand. Kevin groaned, testing his ankle. Ruth heard more yelling from above and Mike said, “What’s happening?”
“Every fault line on the continent might be letting go,” Newcombe said. “That’s my guess. Anyone see another flash?”
They shook their heads.
“You guys all lived here,” Newcombe said. “Are we near any faults?”
“It’s California,” Mike said. “Yes.”
“The first quake was the bomb. Maybe the second one, too. I don’t know. Christ. Let’s hope it’s done.”
“Behind you,” Cam said.
In the east, morning had become night again. Ruth believed the vast distortion in the atmosphere was slowing down, but now a poisonous black stain crawled up from the farthest edge of the horizon, undulating after the shock wave. It rippled and popped, a thin, growing band of darkness.
It was fallout—pulverized debris that had briefly turned hotter than the sun.
* * * *
Everyone drank, even Samantha, as they shouldered their packs and tucked away their knives and a few precious keepsakes. Hiroki had a shiny old quarter that he showed to Mike, then pressed into his hand as a gift. Brandon repeated the sudden gesture with his Giants hat, offering it to Alex.
Before they divided, the Scouts clutched at each other and shouted and cried. D Mac spontaneously turned to Cam and hugged him, too, and suddenly the children enveloped Ruth as well. Mike hurt her arm. Alex kissed her cheek.
It was the perfect farewell against the roiling sky. Ruth would not forget them or their courage, and she hoped that she would see them again. But as she started downhill after Cam, running east, Ruth clenched her fists and wondered how far west the fallout might come toward them against the wind.
15
“Wait.” Cam moved quickly to his right, leading Ruth sideways over a log. The ropy brown snakes he’d seen probably weren’t rattlers. Gopher snakes looked very similar and had been more common before the plague, but he couldn’t chance it. Even nonvenomous bites would inject them with the plague and leave wounds that were vulnerable to more—and fresh blood might excite the bugs.
He helped her get her boots down. Then he kept his glove on her hip, looking for her eyes. Ruth was breathing hard inside her mask, but she kept her face down and all he saw was goggles and hood. His own gear seemed especially filthy after the night on the mountain, feeling the cold on his naked skin.
Newcombe climbed over the log behind them. Cam turned away and hurried in front again, moving east, always east, using himself to sound their trail through the forest. He was totally recommitted to her now. Any thoughts of sending Ruth away on a plane had been a fantasy. The idea that he could stay here with the Scouts, slowly beginning to rebuild, ignored the need and desperation of the rest of the world. He should have known better. Of course Leadville’s enemies would attack. They’d only waited for the opportunity.
His guess was that it was the rebels. They’d taken out Leadville to end the competition to get Ruth. That was a good thing if they’d succeeded. He had to act as if they hadn’t. If help came, great. If not, leading her safely through this valley to the next mountaintop was all that was important. In twenty minutes they’d avoided a cloud of grasshoppers, more snakes, and two furious sprouts of ants bearing white eggs out of the ground. Black flies continued to lose and find them among the pine trees. Cam hoped the Scouts hadn’t turned back. The quakes alone were bad enough and had yet to quit shuddering through the valley, agitating the reptiles and insects everywhere.
Newcombe was right. The bomb had acted like a hammer, triggering the worst fault lines. As those landmasses fell and clashed, they must have shoved against other regions and set off any weaknesses there. Once the chain reaction was done, California might be unusually stable for years, but for now the mountains rumbled and twitched. Cam was glad they’d escaped the lowlands. More of the failing dams and levees would collapse, adding to the destruction, and there must have been tidal waves along the coast and inside the Bay.
“Stay with me,” he said.
Ahead, another huge tree had fallen. Cam angled laterally across the slope instead of risking a way through. There were snake holes in the earth and that made him nervous. He kicked his boot into the pine needles and dirt, showering the fallen branches with debris to scare anything curled up out of sight.
But the movement he expected was overhead. The trees stiffened. Daylight winked.
It was as if God had touched the sky. A new current shushed through the forest from the east, countering the breeze, and in that moment Cam felt himself lose hope. Everything he’d accomplished before today had been set against the vast, lethal reaches of the plague, a few small men and women surrounded by empty miles or dead cities, but he had always had a chance to influence his fate.
I think I just saw another bomb, he tried to say, before Newcombe grabbed at them both and dragged Ruth to the ground. “Down!” Newcombe yelled.
Then another invisible front shoved through the trees, far more violent than the first warm puff of air. The forest moaned, lashed with dust and bugs and flecks of wood and leaves. Cam rolled down and covered his face with his arms, choking despite his mask.
Just as swiftly the wind was gone. He stayed on the ground until his own paralysis scared him. He’d seen too many people give up, and that wasn’t how he wanted to die. He moved. He moved even though there didn’t seem to be much point, wincing at the abrasive grit in his eyes. He was caked in grime that he assumed was radioactive. The sun itself had dimmed, obscured by the sandstorm. Ruth and Newcombe hadn’t fared any better, although there were clean patches on her side where Newcombe had covered her body with his own. Otherwise they were brown like Cam with filth in every crease in their jackets and hoods. It also stuck to the trees, discoloring the bark.
How long did they have left? Cam supposed it depended on how near the bomb had been. It might be days before the poison reduced them to bleeding invalids, but his next thought was the radio. He wondered if they could wire the extra batteries and rig it to broadcast for hours and hours after they were dead. Maybe there would be a survey plane. Maybe an evacuation out of Leadville’s forward base would fly close enough to hear. Somebody might find them, bad guys or good, and he’d rather have anyone secure the vaccine than let it be lost forever in this narrow mountain valley.
Cam took off his goggles and clapped them against his leg, straining through the dust. “You okay?” he croaked, kneeling at Ruth’s side. She nodded distantly.
Her goggles had failed, too, and were coated with grit on the inside. Cam eased the strap off the back of her hood. Then he pulled off his gloves and used his ugly, clean hands to brush at her cheek. He savored the small intimacy. Ruth was obviously stunned, but he could see that his attention helped her focus again. Her brown eyes went to his face. She might have tried to smile.
She glanced at Newcombe. “What happened?”
“Blast wave,” Newcombe said, wheezing. He slapped at his hood. “Christ. I didn’t think it would come this far.”
“You mean from the bomb in Colorado? I—”
“What kind of radiation did we just get?” Cam asked with sudden urgency. Newcombe was too calm. The soldier didn’t think they’d been hit again, and his demeanor set off the torrent of emotion that Cam had suppressed. He brought his hands back against his own body to hide his shaking. He was only beginning to dare to think he wouldn’t have to shoot her and then himself before the vomiting and pain got too bad.
There wasn’t a second bomb, he thought. There wasn’t.
“This isn’t fallout from another strike,” Newcombe said, showing them one brown glove. “It was just hot air, mostly. From the first bomb. It took this long to get here. The radiation might be about the same dose we’ve been getting in ultraviolet every day. Not enough to kill
us, if that’s what you mean. Not at this distance.” He looked at his watch. “Fifty-eight minutes. Christ. That nuke must have been gigantic.”
“You’re still sure it went off in Leadville?” Ruth asked. She’d finally started to pat at her own clothing and Cam used the excuse to lean away from her. He was trembling badly now and he didn’t want her to see what must be in his eyes.
We’re going to live, he thought. He almost wept. He was that deeply affected. He’d thought he had so little left to lose, but he was still a long way from being used up.
* * * *
They stayed put for thirty minutes. Cam moved them a few yards from the snake holes onto a slab of rock, where they settled down to clean themselves, drink, and wash their goggles. Newcombe tried the radio again. He scrawled in his journal. Except for another passing quake, the forest was silent. The bugs seemed to have gone to ground after the blast wave and that at least was a mercy.
“You saw what happened to the sky,” Newcombe said.
Ruth nodded but Cam’s mind was still elsewhere. He looked up through the trees as they talked, absorbing the strange beauty of the dust. A brown fog continued to unfurl on the wind, affecting the sunlight, but they were three miles down into the valley. They’d lost their vantage point and could no longer see the torn horizon in the east.
“The quake hit first because vibrations go through solid things pretty fast,” Newcombe said. “Air is different.”
“The wind,” Ruth said.
“That wouldn’t make any difference up close.”
“No. But the fallout,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“The wind will push the fallout away from us, especially the stuff way up in the atmosphere,” she said.
They needed it to be true, but Cam kept his mouth shut. He was also worried about the plague. If the blast wave had truly swept across seven hundred miles, it would have also brought a massive storm of nanotech. A lot of the subatomic machines might have billowed up above ten thousand feet and self-destructed. Cam supposed the blast could have cleaned away as many as it deposited, but the Sierras rose up like a wall after the great basins of Utah and Nevada. The blast wave might have spent the last of its strength here even as these mountains acted like a comb, collecting thick films of nanotech out of the air.
He was in no hurry to start hiking again. If they’d ingested too much of the plague along with the dust, in another hour or two they’d be screaming with it. They could run back west up to the barrier.
* * * *
It didn’t happen. For once they had some luck. Cam supposed they were still close enough to elevation. Almost certainly there had been wild fluctuations of pressure inside the blast. Maybe the bomb had even sterilized a wide swath of the plague as a side effect.
They got up and hiked. They hiked, and after another mile Ruth began to limp, favoring her right foot. Gradually there were signs that the blast wave hadn’t been so powerful down in the valley. The mountains across from them seemed to have deflected the wind, protecting this low area. There was less dust slammed into the sides of the trees. The normal litter on the forest floor had only been swept into curling fingers and dunes rather than completely lifted away.
In a stand of mountain hemlock, ants dropped out of the pine needles overhead like cinders, still alive. In another place Cam saw a yellow page from a phone book, just a single page, carried up from God knew where. Then they walked into a hundred yards of garbage strewn through the trees, mostly plastic bags and cellophane. It was new. The breeze was already pushing a lot of it free and one bag floated down alongside him as they walked.
The blast must have dispersed weird pockets of debris across North America. Cam wondered fleetingly about the ants in the trees. He’d figured it was a local colony that got swept up but maybe they were something else, like a desert species. The fragmented niche ecologies he’d seen everywhere might be facing yet another upheaval as new insects were dropped into the mix over hundreds of miles.
It would be worse on the other side of the bomb. The eastward flow of the weather would bend most of the dust, garbage, and bugs back over and around the explosion. Where the fallout didn’t kill everything, the insects would begin a new and evermore savage fight for dominance.
There was no reason to care in the short run. Cam had learned very well to distract himself, but he couldn’t escape the aching in his feet, knee, hip, hand, or neck for more than a few minutes at a time—or his concern for Ruth. They hiked. They hiked and found a sunlit meadow where the taller weed grass had been flattened in arcs like crop circles. Cam panicked again when his left hand began to throb suddenly, but after a few minutes the vaccine seemed to beat down the plague, and Ruth and Newcombe seemed unaffected. It was just a fluke infection.
* * * *
They slept like the dead a good mile up the rising slope of the next mountain. They were all so tired that Newcombe nodded off on guard duty, something that had never happened so far as Cam knew. He opened his eyes to a black sky shot full of stars. The aspirin had worn off and he was dehydrated and cold, and possibly his subconscious had rebelled at the sound of two people breathing deeply when there should have been only one.
They were tucked into a crevice in a hill of granite, afraid of more nuclear strikes. Cam knocked over an empty food can and a full canteen when he sat up. Damn it, he thought.
They were dangerously low on water. They’d seen one pond but it had been hazy with bugs—and they were running out of food, too. Those basic needs wouldn’t go away and Cam frowned to himself in the dark, counting through the miles left to return to the barrier. At daybreak he’d look for a creek while Ruth and Newcombe ate and packed and took care of her feet, changing her socks and applying the last of the ointment if she’d blistered again. He figured that even with a short nap at lunch, they should be able to reach the mountaintop before the sun went down again.
But there were planes at twilight. Drowsing in his sleeping bag, Cam mistook the sound for a memory. So much of what he recalled and expected were nightmares.
The menacing drone grew louder.
“Wake up,” he said to himself. Then he shifted his sore body away from the rock and spoke again, setting his glove on the other man’s legs. “Newcombe. Wake up.”
Both of his companions moved. Ruth sighed, a soft, melancholy sound. Newcombe rolled over and touched his hand to his mask and coughed. Then the soldier jerked and turned his face toward the gray sky. The valley was still dark, the dawn hidden behind the mountain above them. Cam noticed that Newcombe’s gaze also went to the western horizon. He’d thought it must be a trick of the mountain peaks, reflecting the noise somehow, but the aircraft were definitely coming out of the west.
“What do we do?”
“Stay put,” Newcombe said.
Their hole in the rock wasn’t perfect but it would have to be enough. The planes were just seconds away. Newcombe found the radio and turned it on, then dug out his binoculars. Cam regretted giving his own to Mike. They watched the rim of the horizon as Ruth struggled into a sitting position between them, her naked cheek imprinted with red lines where she’d lain unconscious against her pack.
“You okay?” Cam asked quietly. She nodded and leaned against him. Her warmth was sisterly and good and for once he was able to let it be just that.
The engine noise spilled into the valley, a deep monotone thrumming. An instant later, brilliant new stars appeared over the peaks to the southwest. Metal stars. The planes lit up like fire as they flew eastward into the sunrise, gliding smoothly out of the night. Cam counted five before another batch came into view. Then the night sparkled with a third group much farther south, all of them coming out of the dark western sky.
This has nothing to do with us, he realized with a dull sense of shock. For so long, everything they’d seen in the sky had been hunting them. This was something else. He didn’t know what, but it was an event like the quakes and the blast wave, too larg
e to easily understand.
Newcombe also scanned up north, then turned back the other way. “Write for me, will you?” He didn’t lower his binoculars as he fumbled at his chest pocket with one hand.
“Yeah.” Cam took the notepad and pen.
“They have American markings,” Newcombe said. “C-17 transports. Eight, nine, ten. They have an AC-130 gunship with them. Repairs on the fuselage. I also see a commercial 737. United Airlines. But there are six MiGs, too.”
He said it as one word, migs, and Cam said, “What’s that?”
“Fighters. Russian fighters. Christ. It looks like American planes with Russian escorts, but there’s also a DC-10 that has Arabic writing on it, I think.”
“Let me see,” Ruth said.
“No.” Newcombe turned north again and continued to gaze up the valley as he fiddled with the radio. There was just static. Cam didn’t know if that was still because of atmospheric disturbance or because their transceiver only worked on Army bands that the planes wouldn’t use—or because the planes were running silent.
“I know a little Arabic,” Ruth said. She reached for Newcombe’s shoulder but he shrugged her off. Cam was the only one to see two of the three groups change direction, the sun winking on their undersides as they banked away to the south.
“Now there are some north of us, too,” Newcombe reported. “An old Soviet tanker. Three transports. Two fighters I don’t recognize.”
“A refugee fleet,” Ruth said. “They took whatever they could find. But what’s on the other side of the Pacific? Japan? Korea, too. There were U.S. military bases there. That could be where our planes came from.”
“I think they’re landing,” Cam said. He pointed south, where the two farthest groups had already dwindled to pinpoints. Some of the glinting dots circled up into a holding pattern as others disappeared, merging with the ground. How? There were hardly any roads above ten thousand feet. Days ago, Newcombe had explained that C-17s were designed to land in very short spaces if necessary, but the 737 and the fighters would need runways of some kind.
